


Water Dancers

by Sera_dy_Relandrant



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe, Complete, F/M, Five Year Gap, Queen Arya
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-02-14
Updated: 2013-08-30
Packaged: 2017-10-31 04:32:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 24,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/339901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sera_dy_Relandrant/pseuds/Sera_dy_Relandrant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if Stannis had never suspected and Jon Arryn had died five years later? What if Varys and Illyrio had time to perfect their plan to put Aegon on the throne? Check the relationship tags for maximum entertainment potential. Told in three parts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Theon

**Author's Note:**

> _"...found one bastard," one said. "The rest will come soon. A day, two days, a fortnight..."_  
>  "And when he learns the truth, what wil he do?" a second voice asked in the liquid accents of the Free Cities.  
> "The gods alone know," the first voice said. Arya could see a wisp of grey smoke drifting up off the torch, writhing like a snake as it rose. "The fools tried to kill his son, and what's worse, they made a mummer's farce of it. He's not a man to put that aside. I warn you, the wolf and lion will soon be at each other's throats, whether we wil it or no."  
> "Too soon, too soon," the voice with the accent complained. "What good is war now? We are not ready. Delay."  
>  **\- A Game of Thrones**

This, this is desire.

The girl's mother has put her in white and scarlet, wedding Stark to Tully in her gown, just as the young prince's surcoat is blazoned in Lannister crimson and Baratheon black.

 _Fire and blood,_ Theon thinks, wondering at the odd choice of colours as he takes his lady's arm. _The colours of House Targaryen._ His Sansa is in silver and blue, as though she would proclaim herself her father's daughter still, though she has been his bride for three moons now.

"How do you like this, Sansa?" He strokes her arm, the brush of his fingers as light as a summer draft. She shivers. He smiles.

"Well enough, my lord." She looks up at the blackened timbers of the Great Hall, down at the rushes and sweet herbs freshly strewn on the flagstones and all around at the beasts prowling on banners of bright silk. In short she looks everywhere but at him. "It is a very great honour for my lord father."

"Not that, sweetling." The girl is pale and willowy as a young weirwood, the boy golden and gallant. They are as lovely to look upon as a pair of matched coursers. They both look straight ahead though, she is very stiff on his arm and his eyes are firmly fixed on the Queen, his mother. "This." Sansa is graceful, charming, amiable - and married. Everything that her sister is not. "Following the hem of your sister's gown as she sweeps ahead of you for the rest of your life."

She finally turns to look at him, with those big blue eyes of hers that she keeps so carefully vacant. "I beg your pardon, my lord?"

He is the last of the high lords to take his seat on the dais. Prince Tommen is a boy of twelve, Bran's age. But where Bran is sturdy and straight-limbed, a son any father would be proud to own to, the cub prince is as round and red-cheeked as an autumn apple. It is the greatest of japes to see Lady Margaery, who tops him by a good half-foot, take him in to supper. Her husband, Robb, has the adoring little princess, with the bloom of her first flowering on her, on his arm.

They have put the little wolf-bitch on her mother's right hand, two places down from the Queen and just opposite Prince Joffrey. She has a face made for scowls and her smile is strained as she tries - and fails - to make small talk.

"I am happy in my sister's good fortune," Sansa says as she takes her seat, next to him. She peels her carmine-touched lips back to smile, very prettily. A lady always minds her courtesies. He can see the wolf's snarl underneath it though.

"Why, both of you in red. I wonder that no one has said a word of it yet," she says gaily, turning away from him to address her sister. "You looked very well together when you walked down the hall, Your Highness, Arya. Everyone spoke of it."

But he has not finished with her. Under the table he bunches up her gown, pushing it up until he can caress her thighs, soft and pale. He luxuriates in the blankness of her smile as she turns to him. Such a sweet little wife. "Yes, my lord?"

"A moment of your time, Sansa." He bends forward to whisper in her ear so that from where Lord Eddard sits it looks as though he is whispering endearments into his daughter's ear. "I would call your attention to His Grace, our noble king. See where he looks."

It should be as plain as daylight but his wife is a lady. Ladies are taught to look and not to see. "He must be pleased that Arya and the Prince are getting along so well," she says. "She has grown very lovely and he seems most gallant. They will be very happy together."

He gives a bark of laughter. "If you say so." He quaffs a goblet of sweet Arbor gold as a toast is called to Lady Margaery, who carries the heir of Winterfell's heir in her belly.

An ardent bridegroom, Theon kisses his young bride full on the lips and the men and women below the salt roar their approval. They have seen him grow from a boy to a man, their lord's ward. They like that he is young and comely to look upon and seems courteous and gentle to their Ned's daughter, that she seems to love him well.

They never see the tears that she takes only to her sept. They never notice that she is as cold as a corpse, a trout perhaps, pressed against him.

"I desire you," he whispers to her. "Look at me, my little love. Yes, into my eyes." He tilts her chin up so that she has no choice but to face him. "This, this is desire. Can you remember that?"

She nods jerkily, a bird with a broken wing that it pleases him to play with.

"And that on His Grace's face, can you tell me what that is? Not when he looks at his Queen, no, but when he looks on your pretty little sister."

"He is charmed by her. He thinks he has chosen a worthy bride for his son."

He snorts. "Your mother trained you well, little bird. I wonder how well your pretty courtesies will serve you on Pyke."

"My lord?" There is a spark of... well, something in her eyes. He savours it. "You said we would not return to Pyke." She has spent her honey-month, the sweetest month of a marriage as it is called, in Pyke. The thought of going back lends a fashionable pallor to her face, even without the aid of a powder-pot.

"Dear heart, I lied," he drawls, savoring the hurt bafflement in her face. "Yes, we are going back home - and Pyke is your home as well as mine now. Your father will be the Hand of the King and Robb will rule in his name here. Arya will learn the tricks of her trade in the southron courts and your mother will be there to whip her into shape when she fails or flails. The younger boys will win their knighthoods but what room is there for me and my wife?"

 _My wife._ She is chilled by the word, he sees. "I- I had thought we might accompany them to King's Landing-"

"So that you might wait on your sister, the princess?"

"It is my duty." She says it quite flatly. There is nothing to be done about it. Arya Horseface, Arya Underfoot will be the Queen of the Seven Kingdoms. And Sansa, the pretty one, the loved one, will the Lady of a speck of grey rock tossed on Ironman's Bay, all but forgotten forever.

"No." He shakes his head. "It is time I returned to mine own seat."

"Your father is still alive."

 _And kicking. How sweet it would be to see him swing on a gibbet. Maybe sucking Stark's cock is worth something, what would you say, Father?_ "A traitor. He can be put aside. His Grace would not deny it of me, so long as I have Ned Stark's daughter to hold me fast to the path of the straight and narrow."

She is clutching for straws. It makes him want to pet her, to kiss her, take her in his arms and fuck her on the great trestle tables where her father and all his men can see. _You're mine._ "You might win greater honours at court. My father would be willing-"

"I am no man's servant, Sansa. I have been your father's ward for too long. I am a man grown now and I will rule just as your brother will. And you, my sweet morsel, will win no honours at a southron court. You will be my wife, cast as high or low as I choose. You will please me at bed and at board, as you promised me when we were wed, and bear me many, many sons to follow after me."

"Blithe and bonny at bed and at board," she whispers, quoting the words she had sworn to him in the godswood in her gown of ivory samite and Myrish lace as white as snowflakes. There are spots of colour burning in her cheeks, anger becomes her. "I have been all that and more but you have not kept your part of the bargain, Theon Greyjoy."

And with that she turns her face away and only laughs when Lady Margaery teases her and says that she has eyes only for her bridegroom. Theon lets his eyes run over the table.

Lord Eddard is as grim as his lady is merry. The royal appointments please Lady Stark who sees it as her children's chance to rise high in the world but _he_ is wary of the lions. Robb and Margaery are as dull as devoted lovers usually are, but Princess Myrcella has taken to flirting with Bran and Prince Tommem stuffs himself just like his father.

The Kingslayer smirks like a cat in the cream at his sister. The Queen's eyes blaze like wildfire as he watches the sulky girl who should take precedence in her son's heart from now. Little Arya's sullenness has rubbed off on Prince Joffrey, he gazes at his mother haplessly like a child crossed in getting his own way.

 _She does not like the look of him,_ Theon thought. _And she is not her sister, who would have covered it up under smiles and shallow courtesies. And he has never seen a woman who does not pretend to love him, none like our little wolf-bitch. They will burn together like ice and fire. It would be beautiful to see, if I had not already made up my mind._

But best of all to see is King Robert himself. It is as though he is chained to the girl, his eyes over his pig's snout dart hither and thither and then irresistibly back to her again. The old lecher is not wily, his lust is as clear as springwater but nothing is said, nothing is done. The ladies pretend not to see, but for Queen Cersei who is no lady. Lord Eddard lives in his own world, he does not see what he does not care to, and his sons take after him.

Arya Underfoot was a babe in swaddling cloths when Theon first came to Winterfell, Lady Catelyn's gift to Lord Eddard who had been away at the wars since she was conceived. He remembers her for the wretched urchin she was, who grew into a wild pup, her septa's despair, a trial to her mother, forever pretending to be the boy she was not. And lately, flowering into womanhood, the angles of her face sharpening till at last she began to look strikingly like the stone maiden of the crypts. Anyone could see it, she was Lyanna Stark all over again all the old servants said, from her beauty to her willfulness, her wildness.

He wondered if they would both have her, the father and the son who looked nothing alike. The king would kiss her and pretend she was his dead sweetheart, the prince would just fuck her and before her maiden's blood had dried take himself away to some golden-haired whore who would welcome him with open arms. Perhaps they would both take her at the same time. The thought of that excited him irrationally and underneath the table he squeezed Sansa's breast so hard that she winced. Briefly he wondered what she would do if she took Kyra into his bed and commanded her to service the kennelwench while he watched. He might even do that on Pyke, when she was far from her father.

Queen Arya would hate King Joffrey, just as his mother had hated the king, and Sansa would write long letters to her from Pyke, counselling her to keep good cheer. She would whet the swords that she could no longer play with in secret, by nights she would curse and rave in the godswood.

There would be princes, sons that she would love with all the love that was within her, and when the time came for them to be wed she would hate their brides. She would make their lives a living hell, she would bind her sons to her and teach them to hate their wives, just as Queen Cersei would do, of that he was sure.

He rose to his feet, richly amused. "To the Lady Arya!" he roared. "Our Queen to be, whose beauty is as great as the fabled beauty of the Rose of Winterfell, the Lady Lyanna Stark!"

He could see the King start at the mention of the dead wolf-bitch's name. His eyes were clouded and he glanced once again at Arya, who caught his gaze and looked down, flushing. They said nothing, of course, as though they had neither eyes nor mouths.

Grinning like a boy, he pressed himself against Sansa, kissing her so hard that she would bruise. They would do nothing, she would do nothing. She could only smile and let herself be mauled by him, just as her sister would soon have to learn to do. It was a man's world and there was no place for women in it.

* * *

She is sewing in the solar.

She wears a stiff gown of ruby-red satin, intricate gold scrollwork running up and down the long, dagged sleeves. _The livery of House Lannister,_ he thinks, noting how close she is positioned to the Queen.

The ladies' sunlit gallery is as divided as neatly as a battlefield, crimson-and-gold troops on one end surrounding the Queen, silver-and-white on the other clustered around Lady Catelyn and her younger girl. Septa Mordane and Septa Eglantine size each other up like mastiffs ready for a fight, Lady Catelyn and Queen Cersei are as sweet as honey to each other.

"Oh Arya, your stitches are too long," Sansa sighs. "Not _again_. You'll have to do them again, sister."

"Lady Arya is to be Queen," Septa Mordane says primly and Theon wonders at how bad it has become that the quarrelsome old woman has taken sides against her former pet. "She will not devote much time to sewing shirts for the poor, I do believe, Lady Sansa."

"Perhaps you would care to redo them for Arya," Lady Margaery says pleasantly. A Tyrell by birth she is always quick to pick up the scent of opportunity. Lady Arya is to be the favoured daughter now and Lady Sansa is to be forgotten. "We all know how well you love to sew."

"On the contrary," the Queen says coldly, "A Queen is first a woman and a woman's place is sewing by the hearth and tending to her children. Lady Arya, I wish you would see to your needlework - it seems to be sadly lacking, in my opinion."

Lady Catelyn rises magnificently to her daughter's defense. "Arya has many other fine qualities," she says as serenely as though she had not deplored the same qualities only a few weeks before. "She is as clever as a maester and the finest horsewoman you have ever seen. Lady Margaery and she are so fond of the hunts-"

Queen Cersei turns away disdainfully. "Your work is near perfect, sweet Sansa," she says, favouring his wife with a genial smile. "A pity that you are already wed."

Sansa smiles blindly up at her. She even lets herself be petted, like a bitch. She is used to being the favourite, it does not sit well with her to be cast aside for her sister. She is a docile pet but she can bare her fangs when crossed. _Beneath the silks and samites they are all wolves at heart,_ he thinks and wonders whether the girls will take their direwolves to court with them.

He coughs to announce his presence. Jeyne Poole, the steward's girl and Sansa's playmate, notices him first. She colours as she always does when she sees him - she thinks him so handsome. He would rather have her pleasuring Sansa in the bedchamber than Kyra - two well-born young girls, innocent and gently-bred forced to play out his fantasies.

"My lord," Sansa murmurs, rising and curtsying. "Ladies, if you will excuse me?"

He pushes her against the wall as soon as they are out of earshot. Satin rustles against stone and she closes her eyes as though it hurts to look at him. "We might be seen, my lord," she says, very cold and correct. "You would not like it if word reached my father."

He snorts. "What can he do? You are mine, he unfastened your maiden's cloak himself and let me pin the kraken's colours on you. Willingly. You are mine and I will not be denied."

He takes her then and there in fury, shoved against the wall, mewling like a kitten. He wonders if the blood will show against her red gown and wonders how she will smile it away if anyone notices it. When he is spent, she says nothing. He is quick though - it would never do for them to be seen, even now he entertains a very healthy fear of her father. Very slowly, very carefully she tucks a strand of her hair behind her ear. He relishes the fear that she cannot quite mask and the hard, blazing fury too. _I said I'd have my vengeance on them, didn't I, Father? I swore it._ _  
_

"Will that be all?"

"And once you thought me so handsome too. Why, as I recall it, you were wet for me when Robb carried you up naked to my bed."

She slaps him then, her face all white and red and her eyes burning blue with hate. It hurts too, she has spent years grappling with Arya and that has to show. The sound of it echoes slowly and dimly down the stone corridor and she braces herself as though expecting him to hit her, hurt her.

Instead he cups her chin and presses a kiss tenderly to her forehead. "That was what it made it so fun. Breaking you, my little bird."

"So it is just a game to you." Her voice is very dull. She does not resist when he puts his arms around her waist, resting his chin on the top of her head. They are the right height for it. They are often told that they are a beautiful couple - he is as dark as a shadow, she is as bright as a flame.

"Yes, little wife. It looks like you have learnt to play too. The King has commanded me to attend him at court in King's Landing. Naturally my wife is to accompany me as her sister's lady-in-waiting. But who commands the King, I wonder? His Queen or his Hand?"

He lets her go, smoothing the wrinkles of her gown, making sure that her laces are all still knotted. There is one a little loose, he bends and ties it deftly. "I suppose it doesn't matter. You are close to both of them."

She has to prattle the words she has been taught all over again then. "It will be a great honour for you, Theon. I thought of you when I-"

He strikes her. "You're prettier with your mouth shut, Sansa. Spare me your septa's words, they bore me and I like to be amused. You'll remember that if you know what's good for you, for you'll be my wife on King's Landing just as you'd be my wife on Pyke. The only difference is now that you can hurt your sister to your heart's delight and I can savour all the bonny southron wenches. Perhaps I'll bring one to our bed - you'd like that, wouldn't you? One with brown hair and grey eyes? You can pretend it's our little Arya. I'll even lend you a horsewhip."

She steps back from him. "I hate you," she spits.

He laughs. "And I love it when you get angry. Go now, little bird, back to your cage where they are all crows though they twitter like doves and peck at one another. You seem to flourish there."

She sweeps away as grandly as Queen Cersei sweeping away from King Robert. It is a measure of how angry she is that she does not curtsy. It amuses him.

* * *

"They used to have some very fine woven portraits here, I'm told." He brushes his hand over the dark square of stone in the apartments allotted to them in the Darry Place, where until recently a tapestry must have hung. "Of the Targaryens so they must have been banished to the cellars when our noble king came calling, of course."

The look Lady Catelyn sends him is priceless. "My daughter is lost," she says through gritted teeth, "And you talk to me of tapestries."

"And Targaryens," he points out.

"Theon Greyjoy," she says, rising to her full height, very much on her dignity. "Do not play games with me."

"He was only trying to lighten the mood, Mother." Sansa is in black and gold - the colours of House Greyjoy, true, but they are also the colours of House Baratheon. Where her lady mother seems to wilt and fade, Sansa is in the full bloom of her youth and beauty today.

"Sansa Stark, you cannot possibly condone-"

"Sansa Greyjoy," she corrects Lady Catelyn and moves to stand beside him. "And it is not a wife's place to differ from her lord husband. You told me so yourself."

Lady Catelyn is caught in the trap of her words. "There is a difference between differing and knowing what is tactful and in good taste. Sansa, your sister is lost, lost in the woods and the gods only know-"

She takes a small, dainty bite of the little lemoncakes arranged on a tray. "It is better for Arya if she is lost now," she says. "From what Prince Joffrey says, she might well lose a hand for striking one of the blood royal and that too her betrothed. It is better for her to be lost now and for all this to blow over."

He could almost kiss her, kiss those rosy, lying little lips. _You little bitch,_ he thinks, _you delightful, co_ _ld-hearted little bitch. You know this won't blow over, you know he'll remember to the end of his days and you're savouring it now, aren't you?_

"I cannot believe it of Arya," Lady Catelyn says sharply. "She is wild and willful I grant you that but she would not so forget herself as to strike Prince Joffrey over a butcher's boy."

"You forget that I was there," Sansa reminds her. "I saw her. She did not strike him. She slashed at him with that Needle, the one Jon Snow gave her, and sicced Nymeria on him. She threw his own sword, Lion's Claw, into the stream and then ran away. Is not my word good enough, my lady mother?"

Lady Catelyn says nothing, she has not cut her older daughter out of her life yet, though she doubts her more and more with every passing day. "Why were you out riding with Prince Joffrey alone?" she finally asks. "You were to take Arya with you. You said you would chaperon them while they rode to see the spring flowers today. But here I find you were charming the prince all by yourself while you let your sister run off."

"She wanted to run off," Sansa says spitefully. "She's always running off while I'm expected to stay and do my duty."

"Young lady-"

"I beg your pardon, Lady Catelyn," he interrupts. "But it is not for you to set the standards of Sansa's behaviour now that she is my wife. I permitted it, there could be no impropriety since we all know how passionately the prince is in love with her sister."

"You are very quick to point out any defects in my behaviour," Sansa says sharply. "But when it comes to _Arya_ , when the truth should be plain to you, you must look away and pretend that it is not her fault. And why is that? Is it because she is to be Queen and I am only to be one of the women in her rooms, sewing for her while she plays with her swords, getting her ready because she is too stupid and clumsy to know how to look and behave like a queen?"

The woman cannot meet her daughter's eyes. The best she can summon up is, "Prince Joffrey is a man grown, he is seven-and-ten. Surely he could fend off a girl of fourteen-"

"Are you questioning the prince's courage?"

"No, Sansa-"

"Are you questioning the veracity of his words? Will you say that the prince, who will be your king, is lying?"

Lady Catelyn, never the most sweet-tempered of women, is goaded. "I am questioning you, my daughter," she says flatly. "I am questioning your loyalty to your sister, to House Stark to whom you owe your first allegiance."

She rests her head against his shoulder. "My first allegiance," she says, very precisely. "Not my last. I owe my allegiance to House Greyjoy now."

He strokes her cheek. "We do not sow," he says drolly, his words dripping with double meanings.

Lady Catelyn turns flat on her heel and strides away.

* * *

There is much talk of the Dothraki screamers across the Narrow Sea, of a Targaryen girl brought to bed of a horselord's son who begs for an army to restore her father's throne.

It bores Theon to tears and makes him grateful that his lady wife's manipulations have not yet bought him a seat on the Small Council.

"Beautiful," Lady Arryn, the late Hand's widow, murmurs. Princess Myrcella is to be wed to her sickly son. Theon had wondered that the lioness queen had permitted it, before realizing that she would be able to keep her daughter close by her forever if the husband was weak. "My niece is a very beautiful bride, don't you think? Almost as lovely as I was on my wedding day."

"Mother says you wept floods of tears on your wedding day, Aunt Lysa," Sansa says. "A lake."

Lady Arryn gives a jerky nod. "So will she," she says, with sharp, sweet malice. "So will she, mark me well on that."

In cloth-of-silver and cloth-of-gold, the dowagers sit side by side, Lady Catelyn in ermine and Queen Cersei in emeralds. Sansa and the Lady Lysa hover somewhere in the middle, like carrion crows feasting on death.

Prince Joffrey is already at the altar, the bright light strikes him full in the face and he seems to glow, to gleam like the golden Warrior who stand in the niches. Behind him is his uncle, the Kingslayer all in white. _Shades of each other,_ Theon thinks. _They could have been father and son._ Not so the King himself, complaisant in his ignorance. There were words exchanged between him and his Hand at the Darry Place, Lord Eddard had begged him to reconsider the match but King Robert would have none of it. He wanted the girl in King's Landing to be put, howsoever unwilling, into his son's bed - and in time, perhaps his own.

"Arya will not be so tractable a bride as you were, I fear," Sansa sighs.

"Then it will go hard for her," her aunt says with relish. "She's not like you, eh?"

"I was deeply in love with my lord husband," Sansa says smoothly. Appearances must be maintained - in public they coo like turtledoves. She is careful to keep her side of the bargain, just as he is. "As I still am. It gave me pleasure to submit to his authority."

Lady Arryn snorts eloquently. There is a flutter at the back and there is Lord Eddard himself now, leading a bride who is anything but blushing. Her gown is stitched with thousands of crystal beads, it has all the glitter of fresh-fallen snow. Beneath a swirl of lace, her face is drained of all colour, the blue roses in her hands tremble. She walks slowly, steadily, like a woman to the executioner's block. Lord Eddard's face is still and blank, there is none of the joy that he wore when he gave his older daughter away in his godswood.

Theon makes careful note of his lady's face - the flash of jealousy (that she is quick to hide) when she looks at the father and daughter. The vindictiveness. Lysa Arryn is a rice-pudding of a woman, soft, doughy and doubtful and Sansa is still a girl, slender and supple, but for a moment they look very much alike. _Malice._

"How do you like this, Sansa?" He strokes her arm, the brush of his fingers as light as a summer draft. She does not shiver as she had in Winterfell's Great Hall, but he smiles all the same.

"You are a rare one for smiles, my husband," she murmurs, brushing off his hand as she would a troublesome fly. "I like it well enough - how can I not? My sweet sister is being wed. She is to be Queen."

He thinks of them as little girls, slamming doors in each other's faces, screaming that they hated each other, slaps and snaps, even docile Sansa lashing out like a savage little wolf-pup. Summer's quarrels when they were both children. They are not children any longer. "Winter is coming," he says lightly.

She looks him full in the face. "No," she says flatly. "Winter has come and gone. This is to be my summer."

Tenderly, Lord Eddard unpins the wolf's head that holds up his daughter's maiden's cloak. The velvet, heavy with freshwater pearls, falls from her slim, white shoulders and she looks smaller than ever. So fragile. She is only fourteen, two years younger than Sansa was at her own wedding.

"How well you loved me that day," he whispers close to her ear. "How prettily you blushed."

"I loved where I was bidden to. I was always dutiful and well it served me. Perhaps Arya with her- her passion that Father loves so well, will do better with the prince."

"His Grace's hand lies heavy upon you two sisters then. He commanded your father to bind his ward, the traitor's son, closer to the realm with an alliance. But Lord Eddard had two daughters, didn't he? One would have served as well as the other and both of you had flowered. You might have begged your mother to put Arya in your place - you used to be the favourite, as I remember."

"I should have. But I was a fool for I was in love."

Prince Joffrey steps forward, a cloak of crimson bundled in his arms - the cloak Lord Tywin Lannister had thrown over his bride's shoulders. His lady mother's colours. Strange and stranger. Before he pins it on his bride, his gaze flies straight as an arrow to Queen Cersei, as though asking her permission. She gives him the tiniest of nods and then, as easily as that, Arya moves from her father's protection to her husband's.

_But who will protect her from him?_

As rough as a ploughman, he grabs the girl and smashes his mouth against hers. Theon is the first to rise and applaud and after a moment's hesitation, Sansa rises with him, a bright, brittle smile stitched on her lips.

Afterwards, there is dancing. Lady Catelyn's little princess slouches at the dais, nursing a cup of strong, sour Dornish red. The King eyes her as greedily as the lamprey pies he tucks into, he cannot wait for the bedding. Prince Joffrey lolls next to her, his thick, wormy lips scrunched into a child's pout. It is only when the Queen leads him into the circle of dancers that he truly smiles, as a joyous bridegroom should.

The Queen is beautiful and looks almost young as she dances with her son, laughter brimming in her eyes. She smiles limpidly up at her twin, who watches her coldly from the high table, and there is a streak of malice in that smile when she stands on tiptoe to kiss her prince's cheek and then his lips. Lord Littlefinger dances with three copper-haired women - Sansa, her mother and her aunt -, interchanging them as though they are but the same. _Maiden, mother and crone._

Princess Myrcella giggles and twirls with Bran, she has no eyes for her betrothed - Sniffling Sweetrobin who shuffles and ducks behind his mother's skirts. Lord Stannis Baratheon, come from Dragonstone after many long years, grinds his teeth and his lady parades their ugly daughter, a shrinking violet, in front of eligible suitors.

Queen Cersei whispers something in her tall son's ear, her eyes sparkling wickedly. He nods and grins and lopes up to the high table to do his duty by his northern bride. Arya looks half-tipsy already, as though hoping that wine might fortify her for her ordeal. She puts her hand in his and lets him whisk her away, as though they are a prince and a princess in a fairytale, madly in love with each other.

"Where is Lady anyway?" Theon asks Sansa, flushed after a dance with handsome Ser Loras Tyrell.

"Chained in the kennels," she says briefly. "With Summer and Shaggydog. Why?"

He brushes her hair off the nape of her neck, so that he might stroke it. "Pity about Nymeria. Strange to think that she's the first of those wolves of yours to die. You children have had them for five years."

"A lifetime." She tilts her head back and closes her eyes. All over the hall there are men watching her - from wily Lord Littlefinger to the Prince's Hound. How they must envy him. "But no less than Arya deserved."

"Pity that the butcher's boy had to pay for it. They've been friends for years."

"Even princesses should know that they are not above the law." Sansa shrugs daintily. "She needed a sharp lesson. I hope she will learn from it."

"You feel that you should hope. But you don't. You'd rather like to see her repeat it again."

"She's a stubborn little fool," Sansa says sweetly, though she pitches her voice low enough that only he can hear. Appearances. "Of course she'll repeat it again."

And she does. Prince Joffrey sticks as close to the girl as a leech, he bends his golden head to kiss her sulky brow and then to whisper in her ear. She starts violently and then horror of horrors, she draws back her arm and slaps him.

"Talk about a blushing bride," Theon whispers into his wife's ear and she stuffs her fist into her mouth to keep from giggling. "I wonder what he said to set her off so." _Perhaps something about the butcher's boy? Or that dear little wolfling of hers?_

"Oh now she's done it." Sansa's eyes sparkle as she turns to him, for a moment they are comrades in their mirth and malice.

Prince Joffrey draws back his hand as though to strike his bride but then, catching the warning look in his mother's eyes, says nothing. He bows stiffly to her and stalks away. Arya is defiant enough for the both of them. She stands all alone in the centre of the hall, cheeks flaming, glaring everyone down like a baited wolf. He half-expects her to warg into some fearsome, yellow-eyed beast with blood dripping from fangs and claws, as they say the wildlings north of the Wall still do.

He cannot help but admire her nerve. "My Lady Princess," he says, taking her hand and bowing. "May I have this dance?"

She looks at him and then at Sansa, sitting so sweet and innocent at the high table. "No," she says flatly. "I don't need you to rescue me." She makes to move away, out of the hall, out of their lives perhaps if she could, but Queen Cersei blocks her path.

"Bed them," she says, with icy dignity. "It is time that you were truly made a wife, Lady Arya."

 _She's planned all this,_ Theon thinks in amusement. _She planned it at the right moment, she told him what to do because she knew how our little bitch would react. Gods, what a mess he'll make of her tonight._

And he does. When Sansa breaks her fast with him the next morning, she is pleased to report that the sheets were soaked with blood for her sister had been mauled, as though by a wild animal, by her loving husband.

* * *

This, thinks Theon stretching luxuriously out on Chataya's finest featherbed, is how a king should live. War, wine and women. Dancy and Alayaya are spent, they lie tousled and entwined with eachother by the fireplace. The pale Lyseni and the dusky Summer Islander, lovely as wild animals.

"Fit for a king," he tells them and thinks that King's Landing is worth its name, truly.

Yaya peeps up at him. "Not us," she says, laughing. "That's Ami you mean, nine nights out of ten she's pleasuring the king."

It comes as no surprise to Theon that King Robert is a frequent patron of Chataya's. "Is she as good as all that?"

"And how'd we know since we haven't tasted her yet?" Dancy demands, pert as you please. "Unless m'lord would like to pay for all three of us together..."

"If she's a feisty little redhead I just might, sweetling. My lady wife has red hair."

"Nay, she has brown hair. Grey eyes too." Dancy smiles a secret smile. "Just like the little northern princess."

"My sister has brown hair too," Theon tells them, his lip curling as he remembers Asha. The laughter. _Father called her his heir. She isn't. Its me who should be the heir._ "I'd like to fuck her too. With a spear."

"Everyone's always asking for Ami these days," Yaya says resignedly. "Not that she's special but everyone knows His Grace took a fancy to her and then made a habit of her. Though he doesn't come here as often as that now, just once a week to quench his thirst, so's to speak. He seems _busy_ at the castle now if you ask me."

"And he comes to see that little girl of his sometimes," Dancy says. "Barra, that's Mheagen's little one. She's a little beauty with those big blue eyes of her's and those black curls. Five years old now and doesn't he dote on her."

"Even Lord Stannis came to see her," Yaya says giggling. "Barra, not Ami, that is. Lord Stick-in-the-Ass, he can't put it into his own lady and no wonder what with that frightful big moustache of hers, enough to scare any man off I hear. I think he has a taste for the little ones."

"Lord Spider brought him," Dancy says. "All in pink silk, like a woman."

A morsel of juicy court gossip, perhaps. The Eunuch and Stannis Baratheon seeing King Robert's little bastard in the dead of the night. It does not interest Theon. He likes to leave the scandals to his wife - perhaps he will share this with her. It just might interest her royal patroness. "Turn over," he bids the girls.

* * *

"I should like to be like Her Grace."

She is standing in front of the window, bathed in the creamy pink-and-gold glow of dawn.

"What, a queen?"

She smiles at him over her shoulder, something crafty in her big blue eyes. "The Queen of Thorns is another queen. I think I would like to be like her too, when I am old and ugly." She yawns and stretches. Then pragmatically she adds, "We shall have to look for a husband for Jeyne. You have not left her her maidenhood, so her bartering value will be less but still... she is my friend."

"After all that?" he asks, amused. "After she betrayed you, she was so wild to fuck me-"

"Yes," she says simply. "After all that. Men will always cause women to suffer. It is inevitable, but it does not have to be painful, it does not have to tear us apart."

"Another of the Queen's pearls of wisdom?"

She picks up a hairbrush, silver set with sapphires. He cannot remember if it is a present or not. "Yes."

"You are not so good a friend to your sister."

She stretches and yawns. "She is only my sister. Just as Aunt Lysa is only Mother's sister. That is all."

"Does he ever let her go?" Theon asks, curious. It has been weeks since the wedding and he has scarce seen the girl, Arya Underfoot who used to go riding for hours every day, who'd hang around the training yards as long as her mother would let her.

"Sometimes." She shrugs. "She sews in the gallery with us. The Queen has been teaching her the satin stitch."

"She'll love that."

"She has to have an heir," Sansa says sharply. "The Prince sees to his duty by her in the bedchamber. If he wants her there, chained and naked, she'll have to stay there, won't she?"

"She won't give him an heir if he kills her."

"He won't. The Queen won't let him."

"Does he truly have his White Knights beat her when she misbehaves?" It is only the merest wisp of a rumour, he cannot countenance that it might be the truth. The Lord Hand's little daughter, the King's pet - they all know that Prince Joffrey bears little love for his northern bride who shamed him so, but still...

But Sansa, in the thick of the inner circle, takes it as a matter of course. "His Hound, yes - he is a Lannister dog and can be trusted to hold his tongue. Not the others. They never leave a mark on her body." The matter-of-factness of her words is chilling.

"My, my, aren't we callous. Does your mother know?" He wonders what the proud Starks would make of it.

"Do mothers ever know?" she challenges him. "Did my mother ever know? Did Aunt Lysa's mother ever know? She's told me tales of what her father did to her that would- well, never mind."

"Lady Tully was dead by the time her daughters were wed."

"A lucky mother then. It hurts to see a son wed but it is ten times crueller when a woman's daughters are sold away. The Queen loves Princess Myrcella, she chose her marriage well. She knows that the Arryn boy will never touch her."

Theon Greyjoy cannot imagine little Lord Robert growing up to touch any woman - other than his mother, of course. "And your lord father and the king must hear even less," he says. "But why don't you tell your mother if she's too proud or fearful to, little wife?"

"She never thought of me. She never cared to ask me how my marriage fared. Why should I do the same for her?"

"She never thought to ask because you were too proud, little ninny."

"Oh well, so is she, in her way. We're sisters after all, aren't we?"

 _Yes,_ he thinks, watching her as she brushes her hair mechanically. Her little feet swing in time to the tune that she hums - she has always been fond of songs and singers. _Yes, I can see that you two bitches are sisters._

"Why?" she asks him suddenly. Her delicate face, made only for smiles, is drawn into a frown. "Why?"

"Why what?" he asks lazily, though he knows. "Here, sweetling, give it to me here." Like a trained bitch, she hands him the brush and he runs it through her long, silky hair. " _To the fairest flower of Winterfell_. Who had this engraved for you?"

"The Prince." She smiles.

"Don't get any ideas."

"I know my duty, my lord. Even if you don't."

"I meant it for you," he says very sweetly. He curls a strand of her auburn hair around his finger. "He does not want you the way you want him, it's there in his eyes if you would but see it. I don't want him to break your heart. And I know my duty. Have I ever shamed you in public?"

She shakes her head, no.

"And I never will, not until you do." He tugs at the curl wound around his finger hard, and she winces and wriggles out of his hold like a trout. "Why, you wanted to know. Because you were beautiful, because you were breakable. Because you deserved it." _The sins of the father._

He thinks of his brothers dead before their time, the smoking ruins of Pyke, his mother with her hair unbound and the claw-marks on her face, gouged by her own sharp nails, wailing and beating her breasts. And his father most of all, the ferocity in his eyes as he shook him before Stark finally took him away. _Swear to me, boy, swear that you will do all in your power to break them as they have broken us. Swear to me that you will never forget who's son you are, swear to me that you will have your vengeance someday. Yes, lord father, I swear it. I swear it by salt and stone and steel._

Sailing back home fifteen years later, his soft bride from the greenlands on his arm. They had laughed at him, a catamite to their eyes in his silks and gold chain. _By all the devils of the deep, you will never be my heir. You shame me. Your sister is more a man than you, go suck at Stark's cock, even his soft daughter is more a man than you will ever be._ _  
_

"Because you could." She begins to plait her hair, her face quite blank. She does not know the half of it. She has never lived with a sword swinging above her head, even now he is not as harsh with her as he should be. _I am a better husband than Joffrey,_ he thinks spitefully, _you're luckier than you know, bitch_. "That's what all men do, Aunt Lysa and the Queen told me. A pity my lady mother was a fool and never thought to tell us. It would have served us better than learning how to sew and sing - to learn how to suffer and endure."

He rolls over on the bed. "That's what makes a woman desirable," he tells her. "How breakable she is. Did you see the way they all looked at you when you first came to court? From Littlefinger to Sandor Clegane? They all wanted a piece of you, they all wanted to snap you into two."

"Now they know they can't," she says placidly. "For I have been broken and I have learnt how to mend myself. Perhaps Arya will learn to do the same in time." There is even a trace of compassion in her voice as she thinks of her sister, the sister she grew up with in Winterfell and not her bitterest foe. She twists the thick plait of her hair on to her crown and pins it in place. Beautiful as she is he realizes that she has killed his desire - the potent brew of lust for her body and resentment for all that she represented, the need to shove her down and keep her there. She reminds him of Cersei Lannister. Of Lysa Arryn.

"But Arya's to be Queen," he points out to her with relish, wanting to break through the barrier of her cold, proud beauty. "And as soon as I whisk you off to Pyke as I shall someday, you're to be nothing at all." It is the threat he always keeps - Pyke where he will be lord and master with none to gainsay him. Lately she seems to mind it less and less and he realizes, with a start, that all he has are empty words.

"I'll savour the memories then." She begins flicking through the chest at the foot of their bed, her chest of gowns. She says it as though it does not matter very much, as though he has already done the worst he can to her and so it does not matter what he does now. "Did you ever love me?"

She had when all she needed to fall in love was a pair of fine, dark eyes or a honeyed voice or perhaps a princely horse and fine raiment. He'd liked her in his way for the beddable little morsel she was, certainly he'd fantasized about her as more than half the castle had after she'd flowered. And she had presented a most eligible opportunity for marriage - or so he'd thought. "Yes," he says.

"But then we went to Pyke, after the wedding. And you changed."

He shrugs. "That's life, sweetling. I never changed... I just remembered who I was."

"Was it your father, Theon? Or your sister or your uncles or all of them put together and the men and women who were always laughing at you, pointing at you and whispering though you tried to order them to stop?" Her lips curl into a scornful smile, very like his own. "Theon, Theon. Always sucking one man's cock or t'other, aren't you? So desperate to please, yet pleasing no one. How pathetic."

Her words hit home, as brutally as a battle-axe to the chest. All his life he has tried to please - his brothers and father who took as much notice of him as they might a bedbug that had dared crawl into their food, his mother and sister who were as soft as bedrock, no tenderness at all, the Starks who had never _quite_ accepted him as one of their own... he has never been his own man. He is more boy than a man, he thinks, but his seventeen-year-old wife is more a woman now than a girl. _Sometimes fire simply burns you away, ashes on the wind. And sometimes you come out of it purified, made harder and stronger._

"And now, my lord husband, shouldn't you be out hunting with the King?"

Theon makes a face. "A boar hunt. How appropriate for the bore."

"All the court will be there - Lord Stannis, Father... mind you take care of yourself though." She strokes her stomach, flat as a board. "I can't have you dying before you've planted a little kraken in my belly. Then all this will have been for nothing."

* * *

Baelor's bells are tolling, tolling, tolling for the king. _The king is dead. Long live the king._

He thinks of Sansa's last words to him, uttered before he left for the hunt. _I can't have you dying before you've planted a little kraken in my belly. Then all this will have been for nothing._ For once, he is not smiling.

He stands at the top of the serpentine steps, shadows slashed by gilt bars of light. A long roll down, he thinks and steps back till he can feel the wall stolidly at his back. Arya will be minstering to Lady Catelyn in her grief now, no doubt. He wonders whose side Sansa will choose, which of the widows - her mothr or the Queen she seems to love more than her mother these days. For a moment he thinks of Lady Arryn, widowed so recently.

 _An old man,_ he thinks. _Lord Arryn was an old man and she seems a fool._

But his wife is as pretty as a bird in a gilded cage, there was never a greater fool than her when she was first put into his bed. But now there is a hardness to her, a glazed coating that does not crack, velvety smiles that hide Valyrian steel. _Just like the Queen. If ever there was a woman who hated her marriage, she was one._ And spitefully it makes him glad that she hates him, that in his own way he has had his vengeance on the Starks.

He can hear low voices, a man and a woman, though he cannot see them and thankfully, they cannot see him. He slips back even further in his niche, half-ashamed at his cravenness before telling himself that discretion is the better part of valour.

"-will have to move quickly, my love. Varys says the Dothraki are rallying for war-"

"-savages. I could deal with them myself-"

"You will. We will. Now that we've dealt with Stark-"

"That was clever of you, getting rid of him. I trust Varys and Littlefinger more than I did that one."

"Fear not. We shall have a puppet to pull the strings and we shall rule together. I shall be your true queen. You'd like that wouldn't you, my sweet?"

The man laughs and Theon sees the flash of gold as he bends his head over the woman's. He sees the curve of her pale, sculpted cheek, the flash of emerald eyes as the hood drops from her face and he knows that it is Queen Cersei, as terrible as she is beautiful. But who is the man, he wonders, that tall man with golden hair so like her own?

Is it the Kingslayer or the young king?

* * *

She comes to him with a chain looped around her throat. The golden hands wink at him like bright-eyed conspirators. It is spring, it is a taste of the blazing summer to come but for a moment he can only feel the icy finger of dread. _Sansa's summer,_ he remembers, though he smiles and bows to the Queen, as insouciant as the boy who was raised at Winterfell. _The wolf playing with the lions._ It should be amusing but it is not.

"Why?" he asks simply, wondering whether the other widow, Lady Stark, will take her boys back home with her. _Bran will hate it,_ he decides. _He's always dreamt of being a white knight. And she will hate to leave Arya, but she cannot bear the thought of living here now, can she?  
_

Queen Cersei is a vision in mourning. Scalloped red rubies weep on her black velvet bodice. Lady Arryn, one of the greatest ladies of the court, is equally fashionable in taffeta and thick ropes of black pearls from Lys. Widowhood has turned her hair quite copper with grief and they whisper that she is the greatest flirt, now that widowhood has become fashionable. Lord Littlefinger, in particular, is said to be most enamoured. But her sister is a fool, all the years in the north have chilled her blood. She spends her hours on her knees in the sept, instead of feasting and dancing as Queen Cersei does with all the men of the court - and in particular with her brother and her son.

Cersei Lannister flashes him a smile. "Who else could there be?" she asks him slyly. "You are the King's brother by marriage, beloved as a son to our late Hand, a brother in all but blood to the young Lord of Winterfell. As a traitor's son this should come as a great honour to you."

 _A kraken in the lion's den,_ he thinks and knows that he is even more powerless than Lord Eddard was, before him. _They savaged him from groin to throat,_ he thinks, bile rising to his throat as he remembers the corpse that he was shown before the silent sisters stitched him up. They had wanted to spare Lady Catelyn the sight but she would not be spared. Sansa said that she had turned as silent as one of the grey sisters afterwards, as though she imagined that if she kept her vow of silence as they did theirs she might talk to the dead.

 _They savaged him without a second thought. What will they do to me?_ "To be the King's Hand is the greatest of honours, though I must be the most inexperienced man in history to wear the chain of office. Did Sansa ask it of you?"

Queen Cersei shakes her head. "She is alas, most distraught with her grief. But this ought to come as a pleasing surprise to her. She shall be the greatest lady in all the land now, second only to her sister and myself, of course. We must make the arrangements soon - perhaps after Lady Stark leaves."

 _You will let her go without a fight?_ He thinks but some stray, half-forgotten bond of loyalty makes him hold his tongue. _So you think her helpless, a broken widow who is no threat to you._ He remembers the love that existed between Lord Eddard and Lady Catelyn, he thinks of bastards and old books, of Lord Stannis killed with his brother at the hunt, of Dothraki screamers and the scheming eunuch. He holds his tongue. His lady wife might think him a fool. He is not.

"Lord Eddard was like a father to me," he says simply. "I am... not close to my own."

"Then Lady Sansa must be like a sister to you," the Queen says sweetly. "A word of advice, Theon Greyjoy. I would advise you to treat your wife gently."

"As gently as my good brother, the King, treats our little queen?"

She smiles. "I say it only for your own good. Wives, not bound by love to their husbands, can be... difficult."

"Of course." He thinks of Arya Stark and this time his smile is genuine. "I shall take care to remember that."

* * *

He was blessed with salt, stone and steel as every child on the Iron Islands was. But that was a lifetime ago.

And so when he cannot sleep, he rises from the warmth of the bed he shares with his whores now. Sansa bars herself in her chamber most nights now and he knows well enough not to challenge her. Sometimes he wonder if she entertains King Joffrey, but something tells him that the boy has squirrelled away a secret lover, that he does not want Sansa as she wants him.

 _Ah, Sansa, still a sweet fool for love, aren't you? After all these years... you're not nearly as wise as you think you are. But then, so few of us are._ He does not think himself wise at all. He knows himself for a fool and that keeps him wary.

He rises and throws a cloak over himself and then he goes to the godswood. The air is sharp and sweet as a winter peach, he smells moss and damp and _cold_. It smells like a homecoming.

At first he does not see her for the night is black as pitch. Soft as a wolf padding over the leaves, he hears the sound and the good bowman's instincts kick in without a thought. He snatches at the heavy wool of her cloak and hears her muffled oath as she tries to squirm away. He reels her in, as he would a fish, and his dagger is at her throat before she can react.

"Why if it isn't the little wolf bitch," he says pleasantly and releases her before she can lash out him.

He has not seen her up close for a long time. He has seen her at court certainly, a shrunken doll in silks and gems, a puppet for the King and his mother to play with. Worn out, faded while her sister shines even brighter by contrast. He has heard the ugly tales they say of the games it pleases them to play with her, though they keep her pretty face untouched. But he has noticed the way she moves, slowly, painfully like an old woman, the unexplained weeks she'd simply vanish from court.

 _She's only been playing dead,_ he thinks. He has never seen her face more alive than tonight. _She was never a fool._

"And if it isn't the wet squid," she says, just like she used to when she was nine and hated him because her bastard brother did. _They've made him Lord Commander of the Night's Watch now,_ Theon remembers. _T_ _hey mutinied and killed the old one and named Snow because he was the Bastard of Winterfell. A puppet, I suppose._ Just like him. It amuses him that he is so like Lord Eddard's son now, when he had dreamt of being a trueborn son of Winterfell as a boy. _I envied Snow that, though he was a bastard and I was heir to the Iron Islands. I envied him his father's love._

"So they let you out of your cage, little bird? Or did you pick the lock and fly away by yourself?"

She flashes him a grin. So she can still grin, can she, though she should be all but dead. It amazes him and few things do, these days. "That's not me," she says. "That's Sansa. Only she's so stupid that she can't see the cage they've put her in."

"She's a clever bird now."

Arya shrugs. The scene is so surreal that he reaches out to hold her hand in his, to make sure that it is not a dream. Her hand is cold and clammy, but it is there. "Still a bird," she says dismissively. "Though they let her keep Lady. Not me. I'm a wolf. I'm a wolf bitch."

He has always admired spunk. He squeezes her hand and slowly she responds. He would put his arm around her if he dared, to comfort her, to comfort himself. They are both far from home.

"I came here to pray," she says finally, withdrawing her hand. "For delieverance."

"Not you. I'll bet it was vengence."

"It's the same thing, Greyjoy." She looks up at him and smiles. "So should you. If you knew what was good for you, you would. But you don't. You twisted the chain around Sansa's throat but you never thought she'd have it in her to twist it around you too, someday."

He laughs. It sounds high and brittle even to his ears and dies away quickly. "If she's only a bird, what do I have to fear?" _Everything. There are songbirds to be sure, but there are vultures as well._

It is she who laughs now. It is Arya Stark who is laughing, she who used to be so bright and bonny as a girl at Winterfell. But when he hears her laugh now, that girl simply vanishes as though she had never been. "You should fear everyone," she says flatly. "It's the only way you can stay alive. It's the only one I have." And with that, she slips away, she disappears in the darkness like a wraith.


	2. Margaery

Margaery slides her fingers through her coffer, through a string of freshwater pearls which were part of the Tully dowry, a square-cut topaz ring of sunshine yellow fashioned by the jewelsmiths of Oldsmith and given to her mother on her wedding day, a sapphire rose with diamond leaves that Lord Rickard Stark had had made for his little daughter's trousseau when she was to marry Robert Baratheon. All hers now.

But then she looks down to where her children play in the sunlit court. Gawain and Eddard, four and three years old, play at knights with hobby horses and willow wands. Nell, born in the year of her great-grandmother's death and named for her, takes her first toddling steps clinging to her nurse's fingers. Old Nan sits as she has sat for an eternity in the mellow sunshine, carding wool and chattering to Bran. By turns she thinks of him as his uncle or his great-uncle or even further back, her wits have quite left her but Margaery does not doubt that she might outlive them all. Rickon, the sly fox, is probably away courting one of the serving girls.

 _My children are my greatest jewels,_ she thinks, shutting the casket gently. Her fingers brush against the light swell of her stomach. _We shall give this one a name from the Riverlands,_ she thinks, remembering her good-mother sadly. _That would have pleased Lady Catelyn. Grandmother said a woman could never get along with her son's wife but she was wrong about that, just as she was about so many things. She was wrong about love too, there was no place in her heart for tenderness, gods save her. I shall miss Lady Catelyn._

Robb fiddles uneasily with the letter, as though half-afraid that it might burst into flame in his hands. "Well?" he asks, with a touch of impatience. "What do we do?"

He is like a King in the North but in matters such as these he can only flounder. _Well grandmother was right about men in this at least,_ she thinks, amused. _They are as children when it comes to decisions. They will always look to us to settle them._

"Do?" she murmurs, not turning from the window, playing with him a little. "We have received a royal summons to attend Princess Myrcella's wedding. The bridegroom is kin to you through your mother, it would cause grievous offense to your lady aunt were we not to attend. The bride is kin by marriage to you through your royal sister."

"Gods, woman don't play with me," he growls. "The last few times a Stark went to King's Landing, he never came out alive. First a dragon's coven, then a lion's den."

"Your sisters are alive," she points out.

She can feel his baleful glance burning through her back. "Aye and as hale as caged birds."

She toys with the braided girdle slung low on her hips, grown wide after the bearing of three children. She had been a girl when she had set to weaving it on her loom in Winterfell, pregnant for the first time. _We played at being master and chatelaine while Lord and Lady Stark were away at court,_ she remembers fondly. _What fun we had. How easy it was to not think._ But she is not a girl anymore and the times have changed.

"They think you a boy," she murmurs. "The Lannisters have not struck for years because they have feared your mother's cunning and my grandmother's experience when allied to the strength of our levies. But now they are gone."

"I'm not a boy," Robb said acerbically.

She turns around slowly and smiles. "Of course you are not," she says indulgently, reaching out to pat his cheek. "But it is better for us if they think you are, hmm? They would like to see you quashed. You would like to see them quashed."

He avoids her eyes, like a child who would not be caught out. "Joffrey is a vile monster and I loathe him for the shame he has brought upon my sister but he is my liege lord after all. I owe him my fealty. And he has a right to her, as much as I hate to admit it - he is her husband."

"But when a liege lord breaks a vassal's trust?" she asks. "When he is accused of murder most foul?"

He eyes her warily. "What mischief are you up to, woman?"

She gives a honeyed gurgle of laughter and turns away from him. "You know," she says thoughtfully. "The new fashions from Myr are quite to my taste. Particularly these long sleeves. So elegant, don't you think?"

He reaches out for her and twists her around to face him. Even now after five years of marriage her heart still leaps into her throat when he holds her like this, when she feels the tenseness of his strong arms around her. She would like to give into him but there is something that makes her heart beat quicker than lust. It is intrigue, her life's blood.

She draws out the letters from the hidden pockets in her dagged sleeves. The sleeves sweep to the floor when she lowers her arms, as useful as they are elegant. "You will accuse me of plotting," she says, "and you would be quite right, though I know how you hate it. How sorry I am to have disobeyed you in this, my lord husband. Pray tell me how I might make amends. On my knees perhaps?"

He glances rapidly through the first one. "You consort with eunuchs," he says with contempt. "Do you expect truth from such a one-"

"Read the second," she murmurs. She trails her fingers lightly down his arm. These are the moments she loves most, when she is in complete control of him though he could snap her in two with his bare hands, though they call him her lord and master. How funny.

At first he grunts. "Who is this from?"

She waits patiently for him to read through it again and then his eyes widen as he reads through all the clues and stacks them together. "Gods be good. Arya, how did she-?"

"Hardly a caged bird," Margaery says lightly. "And your other sister too, she is not a little girl either."

Robb swallows convulsively. "You have more letters for me, I suppose."

"Some for you, some for me," she agrees. "I know how you hate plots and schemers. What a pity that it should be in my blood - just as honor and chivalry are in yours."

"Ah Margaery I never meant it in that way-" He bends down penitently to kiss her gently on the mouth. It is very sweet, as light as summer rain, and it does not satisfy her. She tugs his hair hard until he winces in pain and sucks on his lip until she can feel the metallic tang of blood against her lips.

Afterwards they lie together like drunkards. She is too lazy to even pull her skirts down over her legs. One hand she entwines through his, with another she opens her coffer and runs her fingers through the jewels shimmering like sunlit water. She has both treasures well in hand.

"We will go to the lion's den," she tells him, "but not as mewling pups waiting placidly to be savaged." _Not like your father and Lady Catelyn, who gods bless her for all her virtues, was too much in thrall of him to ever master him. I am not like that._ "We are wolves."

"And roses with thorns of steel," he says dryly. "I take it your brother has been invited to King's Landing as well. And his wife and her relatives from Craw Isle?" Willas is married to Renata Celtigar, the greatest heiress of the Stormlands.

She chuckles. "My, what a clever husband I have."

* * *

It is a long way from Winterfell to King's Landing. How kind of their Graces to warn them a moon in advance of the royal wedding.

Margaery shuns the wheelhouse in which the maester wants her to travel, urging the constraints of her condition upon her. "My lady wife should have been a Dothraki," Robb says, laughing. "I swear she would give birth in the saddle if she could."

She has always been an excellent horsewoman. Her grandmother had hated them, the smells and the noises and the unpleasantness from grandfather's death when he'd been thrown off a horse. _Not that I was very fond of him,_ the old woman had told her once frankly. _He'd snore loud enough to wake a dragon! But it was quite inconvenient for me and all that trouble about arranging widows' weeds when I looked quite sallow in black. One needs to be very old to look comely in black and I wasn't that old then either. But no doubt Walder Weaselface must have found black to his taste for after the funeral I had a letter asking me to honor him by becoming the seventh Lady Frey._

Her father had taught her to love horses, it was the only thing he had passed down to her. Grandmother might have called him a puff-fish but he was a doting father. He'd spoiled her and now he was gone, just like Grandmother and Lady Catelyn. _It is all in my hands now,_ she thinks with a touch of trepidation. _Willas and Robb will both look to me._ _Winterfell. Highgarden. My children.  
_

But it is only a trace of fear. She has been raised for this all her life. _Father wanted to make a queen of me,_ she remembers. _Grandmother said there was none so fitted for a crown as me._ _Gods be good, I might have been Joffrey's Queen if Lord Stark was not King Robert's dearest friend. I would have been in poor Arya's place. Perhaps I will never be Queen of the Seven Kingdoms now, but Queen in the North ah..._

"Scheming?" Robb asks dryly, catching her unawares.

"Dreaming," she lies to him sweetly. "I was remembering when I first came North. Such tales as my women told me, it was a wonder I was not frightened out of my wits of the wild ways of northmen! Arya took me riding and she was the best horsewoman I'd ever met, just as good as me. She took to me at once, she used to tell me so much about you in our rides. Quite a matchmaker."

He smiles tenderly, remembering the days of their courtship. "You were so beautiful that I was quite tongue-tied in your presence," he says gallantly. "I thought you had eyes like a doe's, I think I even wrote a sonnet to your eyes. Jon burnt it, thank the seven heavens. You must have thought me an oaf."

"I did," she says, laughing. "But that was before I knew you."

He arches an eyebrow playfully. "Liar. You still think me an oaf. But an oaf that can be controlled."

She leans towards him as though she would whisper sweet nothings in his ear. "Daenerys Stormborn and her son have joined the Targaryen boy at Pentos. They have ships and men and gold... and I am told, something else. Some new weapon of the Free Cities, I suppose, something the Lannisters will not be able to match yet. They will need it."

"They will wed," Robb says, with a trace of disgust. "The Targaryens have wed brother to sister for generations."

Margaery supposed they would. She wondered what would happen to the son that Daenerys of Dragonstone had borne her Dothraki warlord? He had been born after his father's death, he was around ten years of age now. King Robert had sent killers after the young mother and child but both had simply vanished in the Free Cities without a trace. _The Spider wove his webs around them too._

"I wonder if he is real," she murmured. "The Targaryen boy."

Robb shrugged. "He's a man grown," he said. "Who looks enough like a Targaryen to pass for one. Feigned or not, he is their kingpin. But whether he will be _our_ king or not remains to be seen. I suppose you have been thinking hard over it."

"We should not talk of this now," she says primly. "There are ears everywhere."

"As my lady commands," he says and changes the subject. "Do you know how the Old Kings of Winter wore their crowns? A finger's width of iron, as cold and hard as the land they ruled itself."

"Will you give me a history lesson, husband?" she says, pretending to yawn. "Why do you bring this up now?"

He eyes her thoughtfully. "Why indeed? I suppose it would not look well on you, though you would look lovely in anything you wore. But it would not suit you. I would put a golden circlet of roses and vines on you."

"Oh Robb, how silly you are today," she giggles. "Only queens wear crowns."

"And kings," he says dryly.

* * *

"It shall be hard for my sister to see you."

Lady Sansa pours hippocrass for the both of them in her apartments, the silver cups graven with the kraken of the Greyjoys. Her sweet face is as guileless and lovely as it was when she was sixteen, but the planes are sharper, her voice more polished.

Margaery accepts the rich liquid with thanks. "We are all three as sisters. Why will it be hard for her?"

"To see you so fecund when she has miscarried thrice," Sansa says maliciously. She pats her belly, rounded in the sixth month of her pregnancy, proudly. "Poor girl. If she does not give the King an heir soon he will have no choice but to have her sent to the Silent Sisters. Our septa would always threaten Arya with that when she was naughty - and she was naughty all the time!"

"Perhaps you will bear Lord Theon an heir too this time," Margaery says sweetly. "I have already given Robb two sons and you, married almost as long as I, have given him only one girl. How is Jonquil?"

"She's well," Sansa says and for once she looks troubled. Quickly she turns away as though unwilling to let Margaery read anything in her eyes. _So we are enemies now,_ Margaery thinks sadly, remembering the young girl with whom she'd sewn tapestries and giggled with in the bower at Winterfell. How they would filch lemon pies from the kitchens even though they were both women grown and not little girls.

"She's a ward at Casterly Rock as you must well know. It is a great honor for her."

"Such a little thing. She's only three - it would break my heart if my boys or Nell were taken away from me."

"The Queen insisted," Sansa whispers and then dumbly repeats, "It is a great honor."

 _You mean she is a hostage. Cersei Lannister is a mother too, she knows how to hurt you._ Sansa Greyjoy is a great lady now. She wears her pride like armor but inside something in her is broken, Margaery can tell. _A woman can live without love but how can a mother live without her child? If it came to choosing over Robb and the children, I would always choose the children. It would cut me to the quick but I would not break because I would know it was the right choice.  
_

At court she is presented again to the gilded boy she first saw at Winterfell. He is as handsome as ever, perhaps more so, and he gives her a smile that would make most women melt when she curtseys to him.

"Lady Margaery," he murmurs, his voice rich with invitation. "You are fairer than ever before. You would tempt a man to great sins." He smiles artlessly at Robb, reddening next to her. "You will forgive me, Lord Stark. Your wife's beauty has quite ravished me."

Margaery, well used to the language of flirtation, giggles and responds to him in kind. "Ah but that we were both free, Your Grace. You would drive any woman mad." She flutters her eyelashes prettily at him and mollified, he lets them leave with grace.

The Queens sit on either side of the King. Cersei Lannister shines like the sun in a gown of silver brocade broidered with gold and spangled with tiny diamonds that catch the light and glare. She wears her golden hair down about her shoulders, like a mantle of sunlight. Her eyes are as brilliant as the emeralds in her crown of lacy gold, but there are lines on her face just like those on her soul. She is not the young woman she thinks herself.

Princess Myrcella is the centerpiece of a cluster of young bloods, lapping up adoration. The daughter is a mirror of the mother, rendered in softer shades. Younger. Daintier. _Prettier_.

Margaery cannot tell if the lioness loves her cub or loathes her, or whether both war in her heart. But the King wears his heart on his sleeve for all to see. When his sister bursts into a merry peal of laughter, his eyes slide away from his mother and fix hungrily on the girl. Ignoring the Stokeworths who are being presented before him, he saunters off the throne.

"You must share the jape, Myrcella," he says, throwing his arm affectionately over her shoulder.

At once the princess lowers her eyes. "It is nothing, sire," she murmurs.

Tenderly, he tucks a curl that has slipped out from her jeweled net behind her ear. His fingers brush over her ear and they linger to toy with the heavy amethyst drops she wears. "Nothing?" he says lightly, bending over her ever so slightly. Margaery is reminded of a beast playing with its food. "I would that I might make you laugh so freely, sweet sister."

Myrcella manages a stilted smile. "Our lady mother would speak with you. You should go to her now."

The Queen's face is a study. King Joffrey throws her an uninterested glance. "If I must," he says, looking faintly put out. Playfully he tugs on his sister's earring - but it is not as playful as it looks, Margaery thinks. The girl winces. "I would speak to you tonight, sister. A maiden on the eve of her wedding, there is so much that you do not know..." He licks his lips and leaves her.

"By all the gods," Robb murmurs, sickened. "Those letters you had..."

Margaery steps heavily on his foot to silence him. "Lady Selyse," she says brightly, greeting the King's aunt. "What an exquisite gown."

The Widow of Dragonstone is clad in scarlet silks, her stout figure crusted with rubies and garnets. "It is in the newest Pentoshi fashion," the woman says, preening. "Lady Melisandre, who has ever been my most trusted confidante, was gracious enough to advise me." The Lady Selyse is mad for the Red God they worship in the Free Cities... and of its priestesses, malicious gossip reports.

"Lady Shireen, how well you look," Margaery continues. She does not all. She is a most ill-favored young woman, with the square Florent ears from her mother and her late father's square jutting jaw. She wears cloth-of-gold and yellow diamonds but her face is cracked and mottled with greyscale. But she is liege Lady of Dragonstone in her own right, has been after Lord Stannis followed his brothers so shortly to the grave, a royal heiress. "I vow you will drive all the young men quite wild, my lady."

The girl smiles shyly but her mother does not let her speak. "Indeed she already has," Selyse says proudly. "We have had to all but beat them back with a stick. Now she's quite wild about that young whippersnapper, Lancel Lannister."

Lady Shireen blushes but her eyes dart to the handsome, golden-haired young man her mother has named. "I would not marry without your consent, my lady mother," she says timidly. "I would be a dutiful daughter to you." Her mother sniffs disdainfully and excuses herself.

"Poor girl," Margaery begins to say to her husband but there is a commotion on the dais.

"Gods be good," the King roars, rising. "You, madam, are a whore. You do not command me. I am the _King_. "

His mother's face is as white and hard as marble. She whispers one word, her lips barely moving, only loud enough for him to hear. He draws back his hand as though to strike her, yet she never flinches.

"Joffrey!" Ser Jaime Lannister steps forward, one hand braced on his sword as though he would draw it and be damned as a Kingslayer once again. He is as devoted a brother to the Queen as the King is to the Princess.

Joffrey's hand stops a bare inch before his mother's face. Growling, he jerks away from her and rears around to face his wife. This time he does not control himself. He throws himself on her like a wild animal, punching and slapping and kicking her.

"Robb no!" Margaery cries, clinging to her husband with all her might. "No!" She would not be able to hold him but for stronger hands to aid her - Barristan Selmy and Theon Greyjoy join her.

Arya Stark does not even attempt to defend herself. She sits, shrunken into herself, and endures the blows until the King is satisfied and stalks out of the throne room. The courtiers are frozen in place, they would gladly play blind and deaf. It is only Princess Myrcella who slips up to the dais and murmuring something in her good-sister's ear helps her up and escorts her outside.

"Tommem," the Queen calls, her voice clear as crystal. The Prince bows before her, his face full of apprehension. She beckons to the throne next to her and like a trained puppy, he takes his brother's seat. Ser Jaime retreats to the far wall, his face dark with anger.

Cersei Lannister smiles brightly at her court. "My son would rest awhile," she says sweetly, as though this is all a matter of course. "And my good-daughter will have much to say to my daughter - Myrcella is after all a maiden on the eve of her wedding day and they will have much to talk about as young women always do on such occasions. We shall see them all at tonight's banquet. In the meanwhile-" she gestures graciously to the Stokeworths.

Robb's face is as red as his hair but at least he stops struggling. Margaery does not dare let him go though. "Is it always like this?" she asks Theon urgently.

He gives her a bitter smile. "No, sister mine. It is usually worse."

* * *

The bride wears the Arryn colors, ermine and sky-blue satin powdered with gilt moons and stars. Her diadem is a crowned falcon and Margaery thinks that it is Myrcella's own choice for certainly it would not be her lady mother's to see her wear any colors other than the Lannister ones.

The unkinder wits - her Uncle Tyrion among them - call the bridegroom a lucky man. He has passed straight from his mother's teats to his wife's. They wonder if the Lord of Mountain and Vale has yet been weaned, whether his lady mother will be present in the bedchamber tonight for sure he has never passed a night not in her bed.

Both the mothers look utterly smug which Margaery takes to mean that the marriage will never be consummated. _It is to both their advantages if it is not. Lysa Arryn will have a princess as her son's wife, without having to worry that the girl will ever steal Lord Robert's heart. Cersei Lannister will not be parted from her precious girl._

But there is a determined look on the bride's face. _She wants this marriage consummated so that it cannot be put aside by her brother's whim,_ Margaery decides. _She wants to put as many le_ _agues between them as she possibly can._

The wedding pie has been set before them, the bride and groom have just joined hands to cut it open with a sword when the Grand Maester bursts in, wheezing and white-faced. Ignoring all manner of ceremony and protocol, he stalks straight to the Queen and whispers in her ear. By the time he is finished, her face is as pale as his own and instinctively she turns to her twin brother.

"And so it begins," Margaery murmurs into her husband's ear. Under the table, he squeezes her hand as around them great hall bursts into speculation.

* * *

"A hostage." Robb slams his fist down into the table, though he knew it would happen.

"A great honor," Margaery corrects him dryly. "Or so your sister would say."

"Damn Sansa. She might as well be Joffrey's whore."

 _No,_ Margaery thinks. _Joffrey would not have her as his whore. He likes his women golden-haired. Preferably unwilling._ She puts her hand gently on his. "We knew the Lannisters would ask this of us. We were warned. What surety do they have elsewise that you will not play them false, when you are in the field against the Targaryen claimants?"

"My sisters."

She arches an eyebrow. He sighs and drops heavily to his knees before her. "I know, I know," he mumbles, putting his head in her lap like a boy. "I know this would happen and yet know that it has I cannot bear to leave you here. Not when you are so vulnerable." His hands trace the outline of her belly and now she gives a breathless little laugh.

"Oh sweetling, I shall be as safe as a bug in a rug here in King's Landing," she assures him. "You will be out in the field facing blood and fire and the gods know what else - secret weapons the Spider said. And we thought them to be some manner of mechanical device from the Free Cities! Well that is too funny."

_And we thought the Targaryen girl and her son had been squirreled away in the Free Cities. When all the while she rode free across the Dothraki plains, rearing her dragons so that none knew of them for years and years. And now they say she has three, grown as great as the Conqueror's own, and there are three Targaryens left in the world to ride them._

She cups his cheek and forces him to look at her, to meet the fierce determination in her eyes. She is not the least bit frightened, just as he will not be on the battlefield. She must make him understand.

"This is my war," she says steadily. "Just as the one you will face on Dragonstone is yours."

The Lannisters have marshalled a great army to meet the threat of the Pentoshi pretenders (as they call them) on their shores. But it is only an army in name, a fairweather army that will melt away like snow in summer. Lady Shireen and her mother have slipped away, they have already declared their allegiance and that of the Stormlands for the Targaryens - prompted perhaps by their greatest counselor, the priestess from Asshai. Dorne of course, supports the son of Elia Martell.

According to plan, the North and their allies in the Riverlands and the Reach have declared for them promptly. It is only the Westerlands, the Vale and the Crownlands that are staunch for the King on the Iron Throne. But Tywin Lannister is dead, Queen Cersei is not her father and Lysa Arryn's loyalty is a chancy, skittish thing at best. And as for the Crownlands, the Spider's web runs deep here and Queen Arya will have her part to play. As for the Iron Islands, they will sit on the fence and Theon Greyjoy has no power over them.

 _The Lannisters doubt us but Aegon Targaryen will not,_ Margaery thinks, her lips quirking involuntarily into a smile. _He will be grateful for our fierce, unswerving loyalty. And then who knows what rewards we might reap._

"They will kill you," Robb whispers hoarsely. "When I play turncloak-"

"Yes," she agrees. "They will try to. But we will kill them first."

"It is a chancy plan," he says. "And I can say nothing for my sister. She is not the girl I knew. And how can you expect me to trust the Eunuch to speak truth, even to serve his own interests? He has a hundred loose threads and it would be so easy for him to play you for a pawn and-"

"And how sad it would be if I were a pawn, my love. But I am not," she tells him, with the assurance of Olenna Redwyne's granddaughter. "I am a player."

* * *

"Frightened?"

"Not on on your life."

Robb chuckles, a low sound from deep within his throat. He gives her hand a reassuring squeeze. "I'm there for you, my love."

"I'm not frightened," Margaery insists. That is what her grandmother has taught her. _One day you will be a queen._ _It is for others to fear you._ But she is grateful all the same for the comfort of Robb's presence, the solid, reassuring warmth of him so close next to her. She is not frightened... but she is wary. Skittish. The woods are full of whispers and in the darkness she can almost believe in the old gods that Robb prays to. She does not belong her. She has never felt at ease in a godswood, not in Winterfell, not here.

 _Cruel gods they are,_ she thinks. _Hungry for hot, mortal blood. The Kings of Winter would sacrifice the houses of their enemies beneath their heart trees. They would butcher babes at the breast and virgins and grandfathers, weed out branch and root._

"The old gods are said to be especially fond of southron blood," she says with an uneasy little laugh.

"Then you have nothing to fear, wife," Robb says gently. "Then it is the Lannisters who should fear the godswood."

And indeed they do, Margaery thinks. The castle walls have ears but the woods are a different matter.

Arya Stark treads as softly as an assassin. One moment Margaery stands hands-clasped with Robb before the heart tree, the next there is a gentle tap on her shoulder. It is all she can do to stifle her scream - for all her training, the place has put her on edge, struck some raw, primal chord of fear within her.

She shifts closer to her husband in response. The Queen is cowled in grey, like a Silent Sister, her face wan and gaunt beneath her hood. Like a fell spirit attendant upon a demon, Theon Greyjoy follows her.

They have been at court a fortnight, have been wined and dined with the royal family but of course there have been no close words exchanged. This is the first time in years that Robb comes face-to-face with his sister and tomorrow he will leave with all his levies for war. Impulsively, he hugs her as though he is trying to bring back the fierce little girl he remembered, his favorite sister who demanded the right to learn to use a sword and rode like the wind. She stands coldly in his grip, tensed like a whip ready to strike, and he breaks off, hurt and puzzled.

 _She is dead to him,_ Margaery thinks. _She is dead to herself. She lives only for one purpose now - vengeance._

In that the girl reminds her of Lady Catelyn, though the Stark features are stamped on her face. _Lady Catelyn plotted and schemed with me for years, because she would have vengeance for Lord Eddard. No, not vengeance. Justice. But it was almost the same thing._

"These are for you," Arya says quietly, bringing out a sheaf of letters from a deep pocket. She slips off the ring she wears on her heart finger - braided gold set with Lannister rubies glistening like blood. The Queen's signet ring. "This and that last message are for the king. The true king."

Margaery has regained some of her composure. "What an unholy pair you make," she says lightly. In her darkest moments of fear and tribulation, frivolity is her succor, laughter her balm. "You could not look less merry if you had stepped out from the seventh circle of hell."

"I am Ironborn, my lady," Theon says dryly. "The only hell I believe in is the one I'm consigned to living everyday with my wife."

"And I am sworn to the Old Gods," Arya says, her pale eyes glittering a challenge. This one is a blade without a hilt, she can turn on an ally as quickly as an enemy. She is not without cunning but she has lost all judgment. _A madwoman,_ Margaery thinks and pities her. _The Spider chose the perfect tool for his task._

"Then we shall make an unholy trinity," Margaery says pleasantly. "For am I most devout in my service to the Seven." _Freedom. Vengeance. Power. We all want something. Not love nor blood could bind us three so close to each other. We shall be the strongest of allies... until our paths diverge._


	3. Arya

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _"There is only one god and his name is Death. And there is only one thing we say to Death: Not today."_
> 
> **\- A Game of Thrones**

"In Braavos, the best of the bravos attempt the water dance. The water dance demands the most exquisite balance, quickness, and grace and to the water dancers, the man is the sword. They appear to dance on water as they glide across the Moon Pool. Only one bravo in a hundred is good enough to attempt the water dance, and those who master it are even fewer."

The ladies of the court sit in the gallery with their sewing. There is very little stitching done today though - some listen listlessly to the reader, some look down to the courtyard to see the king at his sport, most whisper to each other, their eyes darting over the fans that screen their faces and muffle their words. Arya sits enthroned in state, listening as though captivated by the reader ploughing dutifully through a tract detailing Braavosi customs. There is a cushion at her feet, a crown on her head and in her heart, the daggers.

 _Light as a feather, swift as a snake,_ she thinks. _I know all this. Syrio told me._

It has been years since her last lessons but a true water dancer never forgets. _One day I will see Braavos,_ she tells herself as she has been telling herself since she was a child of nine, ever since her father first brought the Braavosi maestro to Winterfell and told her mother that he was to teach her to dance. The ruse had worked on Lady Catelyn for perhaps a year - on Sansa and the septa, forever. They were good for her, those lessons, even her mother had to grudgingly admit later. They taught her a lady's grace, which pleased her mother, but more than that they taught her to wait for the right moment.

 _One day I will dance on the Moon Pool._ But today will not be that day, nor tomorrow. Someday though, that she has promised herself. _It is good to make promises to yourself.  
_

Her sister sits at the edge of the balcony, looking down as though entranced by the king. He is shooting at hares with a new-fangled crossbow, a gift from his little uncle, a palpable bribe for favor from his prison cell. Joffrey likes the present well enough but for all that he has sworn that he will lope off his uncle's head with his own sword. _Death by a thousand cuts then,_ Arya thinks, amused at the notion. Joffrey's joy will have to be curtailed though, the execution will never take place.

"So far the hares seem to be winning," Arya observes mildly.

Sansa, who has been trying to squirm into Joffrey's bed for years now, gives her a cold look. She drips sapphires but day by day she looks more and more like their Aunt Lysa - or at least to Arya's eye she does. Men still call her beautiful. Her small rosebud mouth is pouty and petulant. "His Grace is practicing," she observes coldly. "He intends to execute the traitor, Tyrion, by means of this gift from his own hand. A rich irony, to be sure."

"Surely his uncle will die of old age before that," Arya says sweetly. Lady Margaery covers her mouth with her hand, laughter brimming in her eyes. She is heavy with her fourth child, in her sixth month now.

"Mind your tongue. Or else," Sansa says but they both know it for an idle threat. With the war on them Joffrey has been quite neglectful of his old playthings. He has new ones at hand to destroy.

Lady Margaery begins to hum a tune, an old one that was popular at court a few weeks ago. The words of the song are of her own devising though. "As quiet as a shadow, as swift as a deer, as calm as stillwater, as strong as a bear... I say, Arya, Sansa, wouldn't that make a wonderful song? I had a idea just as I was listening to that passage about those water dancers. Robb and I held an exhibition of their talents at Winterfell a few years back, we invited them from the Free Cities."

"You are very mindful of your comforts, sister," Sansa says, somewhat sourly. "You have made quite a fairy garden of Winterfell, it seems."

"I am a southron girl," Margaery says, laughing as gaily as though Sansa is only making polite conversation. She has such a gift of lightness of spirit, a blessing really. Arya envies her that. _We are both northern girls, Sansa and I,_ she thinks, _we never really learnt to laugh at ourselves._ "Laughter is my sword and shield. And I cannot wait to go home to Winterfell, I miss my little ones most dearly."

"That might be a long while yet," Sansa says tightly. "I am sure that we cannot spare you now, sweet sister."

"Of course. I would not think of going back without Robb's permission - and being in the field with our gallant soldiers he can hardly spare a thought for me now. I am a most obedient wife, you see." Robb is the spiting image of a northern berserker, tall and burly and broad-shouldered, and Margaery is a flower of a woman, dainty and doe-eyed. But for all that, it is she who wears the breeches in the marriage. _An obedient wife indeed._ Their marriage is little like Arya's parents' marriage - save for the great love and trust evident in both marriages. Where Lady Catelyn was deferential to a fault, Margaery is... not.

 _Gods bless her,_ Arya thinks. _Gods bless the old shrew who reared her._

There is a commotion in the courtyard. The Queen sweeps in with her train and reluctantly Joffrey drops his crossbow when she beckons him over imperiously. They disappear under the arches, arm-in-arm, Sansa craning her neck inelegantly as she tries to see what they are up to now. Margaery lowers her eyes demurely to her sewing, she is making a baby's linen smock, stitched lovingly with butterflies. She does not need to have to try to spy on them. She already knows. So does Arya.

A water dancer learns to bide her time.

The mood, that night, at dinner is ugly. Joffrey has a great thirst it seems, he drinks like a fish. Not the heavy, sweet wines that his mother favors but the coarse yet potent ales that his father used to like. He is sullen tonight, his prize has escaped him - Tyrion Lannister, who had once sworn to hack his cock off with a kitchen knife and his eyeballs with a spoon, is at large. Even his mother is petulant, she has grown very plump and even by soft, forgiving candlelight she is not the beauty that she fancies herself to be.

She might say that Margaery is only pretty insofar as untouched peasant girls are pretty, that Sansa is only passable and Daenerys Targaryen is an inbred bitch but nothing, except her own monstrous vanity, can hide the fact that she herself is a woman far past her prime. But Joffrey is not as blind as her. He still beds her half-heartedly sometimes, Arya knows - mostly to give in to her insistence. But not so often as he did in the first days of his rule, when his mother was a treat to be savored. Now his eyes feast hungrily on his younger sister.

After dinner Cersei excuses herself to attend to what she self-importantly calls "matters of state". Joffrey dismisses Arya with a flick of his fingers. In his way, he has a sort of low cunning, as a beast might. He stalks his prey carefully tonight. Resentment and drink have driven away caution, he will have his satisfaction.

Arya waits in her own chamber, locked and barred tightly. She goes through the steps of the bravo's dance, without a sword of course, but she does them mechanically tonight. Her heart is not in it. She has just decided that perhaps she will go to sleep, she has already unpinned her hair from the jeweled net and let it unravel from its tight braids and down her shoulders when the waif slips in. _As quiet as a shadow._

The little bird is mute, as all of Varys' creatures are. This one is a tiny girl, not more than six years old, her tongue a stump in her mouth, her face very sweet and pale as porcelain. She takes the scrap of paper and the quill from Arya and begins to write.

So Joffrey has had his sister, in her own bedchamber with her husband wailing fractiously and then rushing off to be comforted at his mother's teat. He was as blunt as an animal in his need, he did it without any thought of secrecy and soon the whole castle will know for certainly there were eyewitnesses enough. Sweetrobin. Her handmaids. A White Knight. Two ladies-in-waiting. _Joffrey has run mad._

Arya wonders what Cersei will do. The thought of the mother feuding with her daughter, over the son, sends a most delightful shiver of anticipation down her spine. She has no pity to spare for Myrcella. If she feels anything for the girl it is pleasure for her suffering. _I am a monster,_ she thinks, sliding her rings off her fingers and slipping them into her coffer. _And I like it._

Cersei slaps her daughter in open court on the morrow, calling her a whore and a seductress and ordering that she be confined to her chambers for her lewdness and sacrilegious lusts. Joffrey, sickly, nursing a raging headache and quite cowed by his mother's ferocious rage, offers no rebuttal. He agrees that he has been led astray by his sister's vile acts, he is the victim, she is the temptress. He has had his fun for a night, he will not care to cross swords with his mother for a while now. Until the next time...

And Myrcella, not being a fool, knows well enough that there will be a next time. Arya visits her in her confinement, to offer comfort and solace. She brings a dish of candied violets and sugared roses, spiced with the promise of revenge.

"Don't you want to be free, sister?" she asks Myrcella softly. She remembers the girl asking her the same thing in years gone by, soon after she became Joffrey's queen.

But where Arya had only replied mechanically that her duty was to her husband whom she loved more than anything, Myrcella seizes on the words greedily. As though they are honestly offered, out of sympathy. "Yes," she whispers, "a thousand times yes. If I had a dagger-"

 _You would plant it through your own heart,_ Arya thinks dismissively. _You poor, spiritless little thing._

"-I would drive it straight through Joffrey's throat," Myrcella hisses, her eyes burning like wildfire. She has her mother's eyes and deep beneath the sweetness of her nature, her mother's ferocity. _Lion's blood from both sides of the blanket._ "And I would make my mother watch. Joffrey does not deserve to be king, if anyone should be, it should be Tommen."

Arya places a hand gently on her good-sister's arm, pushing her back against the cushions of her couch. _Easy, my sweet._ She thinks of the Eunuch, gentling her, leading her to the bait, drawing forwards and then back, tempting her like a coquette with a young man. Of his promises which are to be fulfilled. "You will," Arya says, "You must bide your time now, Myrcella." _As I have, all these years._

The girl does not have her mother's impatience. She nods grimly. "I would do anything to be free," she says quietly, "I cannot live in this hell much longer."

 _Oh you'd be surprised,_ Arya thinks. _You'd be surprised how long you could stew in it, if you had to. From the frying pan and into the fire, Myrcella, if that's your wish._ She kisses her good sister's cheek, betrayal on her lips as she says, "And I will help you."

* * *

Snowflakes melt on her cheeks and in her long hair, soft as feathers, as chaste as her brothers' kisses.

She stands in the circular courtyard and thinks that by now the snow in the training yard at Winterfell must be knee-deep. Her younger brothers might even now be practicing their strokes in the cavernous halls - when she last saw Rickon he had just been started on a training staff, now perhaps he will have held live steel. She wears a summer gown, a flimsy robe of gauze and muslin though the snow is up to her ankles. She likes the feel of the cold, of standing still and near naked like an old pagan goddess, a savage goddess of iron and ice. Of waiting, watching until the blood freezes in her veins and her flesh, so warm, so frail, crystallizes into ice.

"Grieving, Your Grace?"

He was a comely youth, but the years have changed his lean, dark face into something vulpine, angles sharp and edges ragged. Often you can see a feverish glitter in his eyes, like a madman's.

She does not even turn, not even when he drapes his arm loosely over her shoulder. "Your brother," he prompts her, when she says nothing, "The bastard."

" _Valar morghulis._ All men must die."

He gives a rasping little laugh. "Did no one bother to tell you, little queen? He's not dead. Captured, about three days ride north of the Wall, on a most ill-advised ranging."

"Wildlings?"

"Presumably," Theon says. "Though the letters tell their own tale. And what a long one it is, to be sure!"

She shrugs. "Men will say anything when their bellies are half-empty and the frost's in their blood."

"You don't want to hear?" he says temptingly.

She shrugs. "It makes no difference," she says simply and really it does not. "If he is not dead he will be soon. I'd rather pray for his death than hope he's still alive and suffering." His warm breath fans against her ear as he leans closer to her. Once he had stirred her desire, he still thinks to play upon it as though he is still a young man with nothing to lose and she a girl ready for anything. Now the scales are tipped. _I will be free,_ she thinks calmly, _and you will die and be forgotten, Theon Greyjoy._

He feasts on grief, she has come to understand. Something poisoned him when he was a boy, a young man with his hopes dashed and shamed - who can say what?

"Aren't you cold?" he asks, his voice warm and intimate. The tired voice of a man with one foot in the grave - and who knows it as well. She wonders if he prays for an easy death, if he wonders if she will pray for him. If he will even ask it of her, on the night when they come for him.

"No," she says absently and really all she feels is a tingling warmth, she has stood in the snow for so long. Beyond the Wall the snows must be waist-deep. Beyond the Wall where she hopes her brother is dead and that they have burnt the body. She has heard too many stories these past few years of the dead that walk, fairy stories perhaps but all the same... "No, I've never been cold enough."

* * *

Sansa wears white, like a bride on her wedding day, to her husband's execution.

Joffrey and Cersei stand together on the dais, under the royal canopy, with Ser Jaime just behind them. Cersei wears an expression of faint distaste, as at a spectacle that though mildly repugnant is necessary - like a sermon at a sept. Joffrey is plainly bored, a beheading is too tame but his mother has promised him an entertaining bloodbath after Theon Greyjoy is dispatched of. So he waits patiently, like a fractious child being good in expectation of a treat - after the beheading there are other traitors to be dealt with, more summarily. Quartering and drawing, burning and boiling - and as a special treat - being exploded into in the air from the mouth of a new cannon.

Arya, Sansa, Prince Tommen and Margaery stand just below them - Myrcella still confined to her rooms. Tommen looks faintly queasy, it is never easy to believe that he is Cersei's spawn. Sansa stands with her hands clasped on her stomach, eyes demurely cast down, the tiniest of smiles curling on her lips despite of herself. Satisfaction is delicious, Arya can sympathize with her sister's emotions at this point.

"I'll miss that boy," Margaery says idly. Out of all of them, she is the most soberly dressed - the others are all as gaily clad as though en route to a picnic. She wears a high-necked black gown, the sleeves and hems fluted with pale Myrish lace. "He had the most dashing smile. And he always made me laugh."

"He used up his smiles too quickly," Sansa says steadily. "If he had smiled less he would have lived longer."

"Mercy, you sound like a banker," Margaery says. "As though we have only a sum of smiles that we might use in this life! No, I believe in smiling and laughing as much as I can. I like to enjoy life." She smiles heartily, though it is not quite the occasion for it. In that, if in nothing else, Margaery and Theon were uncannily alike - their frequent smiles and laughter often masks for the fiercest desperation.

Sansa lets her ice-chip eyes bore into Margaery's for a moment before turning away in silent dignity. Loath as she is to agree with her sister in anything, Arya thinks that she, and not Margaery, has the right of it. _We are not a people for laughter,_ she remembers her father saying, _they say that in the heart of winter a man's laugh is like to form ice in his throat and choke him._

He dies cleanly, with more dignity in death than he ever had in life.

After it is done, Cersei crooks her arm so that her brother might take it. In a sigh of silk skirts she leaves, Sansa and many of the other ladies of the court accompanying her. In truth, Cersei has never made much of a stomach for blood. Arya waits though.

"Why are you still here?" Joffrey asks.

"I thought you would prefer my presence, Your Grace," she says composedly. "You used to say that it pleased you to have me stay at executions." _At butcherings._ _  
_

"Oh... that." He waves a hand indifferently. "Stay. Go. I don't care."

She steps up to stand beside him on the dais, she _is_ his queen after all. In words. In law. "I think I will. I rather enjoy it. It must be your good taste rubbing off on me, sire." And it is not a lie any more now, not really.

As always, after watching a death - or a hundred -, she cleanses herself. The bath is scalding hot and time after time, her bathmaids haul up tubs straight from the kitchen fire to her room. She scours herself till her skin is raw and red and wrinkled, like fresh meat, till her fingers and toes are numb. Afterwards, dismissing her women, she sits before the fire wrapped in a scented sheet. For a long while she sits and thinks of nothing, discipling her mind as a water dancer should, until the last pearly drops of water drip off her pink and crinkled skin and her long hair is dry enough to run a brush through.

Her maids help her dress in a gown of rose-pink with grey Myrish lace. Maidenly colours, fresh and clean. But all she can think of are stretched innards, grey-pink intestines looped out of a living body. Even the pearls on the bodice remind her of beads of fat dripping down flesh in agony, sizzling in the flame.

Margaery is in the sept, burning incense at the Stranger's altar. Her handmaids trail all over the sept, lighting candles, singing hymns noisily and in general being as conspicuous as possible so as to draw attention to their lady's piety. Margaery has a way of parading her holy zeal that frustrates women to no end. Her visits to the sept must always be attended with great ceremony - just like Cersei's, Arya thinks, with contempt. _  
_

Sansa is at her devotions in the sept as well but she makes no fuss of it. She is devout in the way their lady mother was - quietly, seriously, the rituals of sept and godswood a part of her core. She is kneeling before the Mother, as still as a mouse, lips moving soundlessly in her prayers.

Margaery smiles at Arya and says, a little too loudly, a little too clearly, "Our sister must be praying for her daughter, Your Grace. A child not yet four, a traitor's get and fatherless now, far from her mother's care and friendless... I would be in utter terror if she were mine." Sansa has only one child - Jonquil. As the daughter of an attainted traitor, by the laws of the Crownlands, she cannot inherit Pyke after her father but that has never mattered less than now. On paper the Iron Islands have been passed to a cadet branch of the Lannisters. In truth Arya doubts that the Lannisters will live long enough to see their prize - or that Jonquil will live to see her fifth nameday for that matter.

Sansa does not rise to the bait. Margaery smirks. "Poor dear little Jonquil," she continues in a stage whisper, "I hear she is to be wed to a Lannister kinsman to tie the Greyjoy bloodline to the Lannisters. Quite right of course but if _I_ were her mother..."

They step out into the gardens bordering the castle sept, Margaery bored of sharpening her claws on her sister-in-law. "He died fulfilled," Margaery tells Arya, as though she needs consoling. When Arya only shrugs, Margaery pretends to be shocked. "Mercy can you not show a little more feeling? You're as cold as your sister now."

 _Yes._ "He was nothing to me."

"You've known him all your life, ever since you were a babe in swaddling cloths. You might spare a little trouble to grieve for his memory."

"I might," Arya says calmly. "But then I'm not a filthy hypocrite like you." Margaery's smile fades quickly. They are not sisters, they are not friends, not like Margaery would like to pretend they are. They are hardly even allies. Carrion crows picking together at a carcass, working to finish it as quickly as possible - that is what they are. But she thinks that he did die fulfilled. There was nothing left for him to make of the ruin of his life.

"Cersei is a fool," Margaery says. "Tywin Lannister will not be appeased by the show she put up. She thinks to bring him back to be Joffrey's Hand but nothing will make him forget the insults she dealt him. He has quite washed his hands of his children - I wouldn't be surprised if he stayed coiled in his den until he knew which side the tide was turning. Just like during Robert's Rebellion."

With Robert Baratheon's death, Tywin Lannister had expected to be appointed his grandson's Hand - it was no less than he merited, in his opinion. Cersei, determined to be both king and queen, had put an end to that by placing Theon the puppet in his stead. Over the years she had delivered blow after blow to his pride, she was nothing if not consistently scatterbrained. Lord Tywin had never actively risen against his daughter and his grandson but he had been biding his time. And now when Cersei needed him most he would never turn to her.

"Unless she steps down most humbly and grovels for forgiveness. Unless she agrees to let herself be wedded and bedded to the man of his choice, unless Ser Jaime casts off his White Cloak and marries and fathers heirs for Casterly Rock," Arya says. "Unless Tommen is made king in Joffrey's place - I once heard him tell her, when he was in a fit of temper, that the boy ought to be put to death. She struck him for it and then he walked out. Forever." She smirks, relishing the memory. "I cannot imagine Cersei or Jaime or Joffrey ever agreeing to those demands, not even if they had their heads on the block."

"Pray god it will not come to that," Margaery says sweetly.

"No," Arya agrees. "It never should. Beheading's too kind a fate for the likes of them."

* * *

 _Maiden, mother and crone,_ Arya thinks and knows that she must be the crone. She does not mind. The maiden may be fair and the mother fruitful, but it is the crone who holds the Lamp of Wisdom in her hand.

One by one, the three women slip into the waiting barge. A man helps Margaery, gravid with child, totter in. Myrcella, innocent as a kitten falling in a trap, is next and then, without a backwards glance, Arya. The cabin is small and rude, the three are quite cramped inside. It will not be for long but it is certainly uncomfortable enough.

"Gods above, I hate sea crossings," Margaery mutters, trying to make herself comfortable on the narrow wooden benches. Myrcella, who has thought to slip a book and a pack of playing cards under her cloak, settles down and begins to read. She feigns a calmness that she does not possess, she is jittery and when the boat starts she jumps as though she has been pinched.

"So it is happening after all," she says, half to herself. "I've dreamed of this, oh for years..." Arya knows she is thinking of her girlhood, ever since she was thirteen or thereabouts when Joffrey had first began to lust for her body. Of her mother, resentful and fiercely concerned by turns, slapping and shouting at her sometimes, at other times sending her away, as far from her brother as possible.

In the dead of the night when they are deep in the sea and far from the mouth of Blackwater Bay, they disembark from the skiff and board a real ship. Margaery, green to the gills, collapses on the steady deck in gratitude - Arya half expects her to kiss it. She lets herself be escorted by a handsome young sailor to the quarters prepared for them. Arya and Myrcella linger a moment on the deck to catch their breath. There is a little girl and a boy in his teens on board, watching them curiously. A young woman with raggedy black hair and wearing boiled leathers watches over the girl.

The girl is a pretty thing, blue-eyed and black-haired, perhaps around ten years old. The boy... "Edric?" Myrcella says in astonishment. "Is that you? What are you doing here?"

Edric Storm ducks his head and looks away, painfully embarrassed. The little girl tugs on his sleeve and whispers something to him. _Barra Waters_ , Arya remembers, _her mother named her Barra. And the older one is Mya Stone._ He sighs heavily and taking her hand pulls her away. The young woman does not follow them, she watches Arya and Myrcella keenly. Her eyes, as Myrcella belatedly realizes, are a startling blue - just like her father's, she must be thinking now.

"I don't understand," Myrcella begins petulantly. Her hands are trembling, though ever the princess she tries to mask her expression. "Arya..."

A man steps forward and bows to her - he must be the captain Arya thinks, drifting languidly away from her good-sister's side. "My Lady Princess," he begins in a flat and well-rehearsed voice, "I am honoured to serve you. Will you come with me so that I might escort you to your quarters?"

"Thank you, but no. I intend to go with my good-sister," Myrcella says stiffly, as imperious as though she is a princess still. The title is only for courtesy - as she will soon be made to understand. It was never hers to begin with, really. Arya tries to control her face but she cannot help smiling - a savage sort of smile, she thinks, a smile like the one Sansa had worn when she had come to see her after her wedding night.

"I am afraid that it is not your choice to make, Your Highness. I have my orders." The captain nods and four men step forwards. They are big and burly and htey too have their orders. No golden-haired chit of a girl, no matter how pretty and dainty, will stop them from carrying those orders out. _Built like knights,_ Arya thinks, leaning against the rails and watching as Myrcella begins to scream and struggle. They silence her with a hard blow to the head and carry her crumpled body down. _Like white knights._

* * *

They call her the Mother of Dragons, the Bride of Fire and the Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea. And yet she is a slight, girlish thing, she stands little taller than her copper-skinned, silver-haired son who is only ten. Her _stola_ , draped in the Pentoshi fashion, is a soft, watery blue, like a sky after the rains, painted with purple-lipped irises. Her waist-length hair is braided in the fashion of the Dothraki, tipped with bells. At her brow she wears a circlet crowned with three rearing dragons - jade, onyx and mother-of-pearl.

You would think her to have a high, thin little voice - a girl's soft whisper, sweet certainly, perhaps melodious. She does not. Her voice is strong and clear, when she speaks she does so with more confidence than her boy-husband and nephew, Prince Aegon.

"Queen Arya," she greets them from her makeshift throne in the pavilion pitched on the Dornish sands. "Lady Stark. Be welcome."

She is not the Dothraki savage Arya had imagined her to be, she has all the grace and charm of the manor-born. Her sweetness, her dainty prettiness is almost overpowering - on first impression, Arya finds her just as sugary and insipid as Myrcella. More to Margaery's taste, or Sansa's even, than her own.

She insists that Margaery and Arya help her learn the Westerosi fashions - she does not want to look like a foreigner, an usurper from across the sea, when she comes to her rightful throne. Margaery, as gigglesome as though she is back at Highgarden with her cousins, helps the khaleesi twist her hair into the fearsomely complicated southron styles. She offers her one of her own gowns, lilac embroidered with silver and gold flowers. The result seems to please Daenerys Targaryen mightily for she claps her hands and insists that she has something to show the two of them.

Margaery gracefully declines. "It has been too long since I have last been with my husband," she says. "By your leave, Your Grace. And Arya, you must be tired, must you not?"

"No," Arya says flatly.

"Then you shall come with me," the small woman says imperiously.

They walk down the beach, attended by two of the Queen's Dothraki handmaids and by her sworn knight, Jorah Mormont. "I am told that the Dragonpit on Rhaenys's Hill stands no more," she tells Arya.

"It collapsed more than a century ago," Arya says.

"I will never have another built," the Queen says decidedly. "The hatchlings confined to the pit never reached the great size and magnificence of their predecessors. They died sickly and stunted and far too early. Dragons are not meant to be confined. My children will have the freedom of the skies, it is only right."

 _And the freedom to taste human flesh perhaps?_ Arya thinks but forbears to say. She knows the stories they say of the Queen and her reptilian children. They say she bathes in the blood of little children to keep her beauty and that afterwards her dragons feast on the charred carcasses. But there will always be stories, she dismisses it from her mind.

Her dragons are ten years old, the age of her boy and heir, Prince Rhaego. They were born on the very same night, on the night that the khal died, hatched by fire and bloodmagic.

"Balerion is out hunting," Daenerys tells her. "These are Rhaegal and Viserion."

Rhaegal's scales are the green of moss in the deep woods before dusk, they have the gleam of jade. His - hers? Dragons are sexless - eyes are the bronze of polished shields and though half-open, drowsy with sleep, they are still menacing enough. He is the young prince's mount. Viserion is asleep, his scales have the creamy sheen of pearl and he is smaller than his hatch-mate, given to Prince Aegon to be his own in war. "You keep them free," Arya says blankly. They are coiled around each other on the sand, ringed in by a stone palisade the height of a man. It is no barrier at all, only a demarcation of their territory. She had expected chains at the very least.

The Queen's eyes flash. "You would have me bind my own children?"

"Are they not a danger?" Arya ventures, her mouth suddenly quite dry.

"They are," the Queen says sweetly. "To their enemies and mine own." She picks up the hem of her gown daintily and steps through the gate. Without a thought Arya instinctively makes the sign of her mother's faith, her fingers fumbling to draw the Seven Pointed Star at her breast. The handmaids regard their mistress calmly. Arya turns to Mormont.

"Is she immune to dragonfire, as they say?" she asks.

The bear knight wrenches his eyes quite slowly away from his Queen. _He is in love with her,_ she thinks. _He_ _has loved her for ten years, through two marriages._ "Yes," he says simply. "She is more than a mortal woman, Your Grace."

"A goddess?" Arya asks acidly.

Mormont thinks this over. "Yes," he says slowly, seriously. "Yes, I think she is." And Arya knows that he is not the only one who thinks it of the slight girl, crooning to her dragons, petting them as though they are her little lapdogs. This is more goddess than queen and every goddess must have her cult, her fanatics. _And I have never yet heard of a merciful goddess,_ Arya thinks. _Or even one quite sane._

* * *

They hold a service for Sansa in the castle sept at Sunspear. Margaery insists upon it and Robb, out of a sense of misplaced duty or guilt, agrees. "She was our own sister after all," Margaery says virtuously, "however much she erred. We must honor her."

She must already have her coronation planned out, Arya thinks wryly, and her legacy for the next hundred years. _Margaery the Generous, Margaery the Wise. The Good Queen._ Arya does not attend, no one presses her to either. Instead, while the septon raises his censer and the choristers sing clear and sweet for her dead sister and Margaery looks particularly fetching and saintlike in a new gown, she walks round the battlements.

Queen Daenerys joins her. "It was very sad, how your sister died," she says. "I am told that she was a very beautiful woman."

"Joffrey used to call her the loveliest lady at court," Arya agrees. _Though, in truth, that was half to spite his mother._ "Perhaps that's why he spared her face. He would have thought that it would look very well on the ramparts at the Red Keep."

Daenerys raises her eyebrows. "We hear that he had her body flayed from the neck downwards and exhibited in the market square, after he heard of how your brother had deserted him for us. She lingered nigh on three days. A painful and long-drawn death, and yet you speak so calmly of it."

"Your brother died cruelly as well, Your Grace. By your own husband's hand - and as it happens so did my sister. Yet I have never heard you make any lament of it."

"He deserved it," Daenerys says flatly. "He would have killed my son in my womb. The fool."

"And so did my sister," Arya says wryly and wonders if the silver queen has ever considered that her cause is not righteous, that she herself is not the very fount of wisdom and purity. _No, never._ _She thinks of herself as The Mother and a mother can never be wrong._ "Though she was not a fool."

At supper, Margaery is sleek and elegant in black velvet, with a translucent veil of cloth-of-gold covering her hair. She looks very pretty and very pious. Everyday is a show for her. "It is sad how things went so wrong between you two," she says gently. "When I first came to Winterfell you were distant, I never had the impression that you very much cared for each other but you were sisters. What happened to that bond?"

"Pyke," Arya says shortly. "King's Landing. Her jealousy and wronging festered in her."

Margaery nods thoughtfully. "Oh yes, she changed after Theon took her to Pyke just after her wedding. And then when she came back you were betrothed to the prince she adored, her mother seemed to prefer you to her and she was still married. And then there was the pride between you two. She never spoke against you though, she never touched you."

"She never needed to," Arya says dryly.

But Margaery shakes her head. "Even though she knew that you met Theon in the godswood. Even though she knew that you spoke with Varys. She never told anyone, though she relished what was done to you. I thought she looked upon it as a guilty pleasure. Or perhaps she thought you only deserved it, in the face of what was done to her. Something between the two."

Arya leans her elbows on the table and looks at her good-sister thoughtfully. "I want to go to the Wall," she says dreamily, though she does not, not really. "I want to hear about what happened to Jon."

Margaery sighs heavily. "You know that he is dead, most likely, though it must cause you great grief to accept it."

 _I prayed for his death, you fool,_ Arya thinks but she nods. "And I would like to see Winterfell too," she says sweetly.

At once Margaery's eyes slide away, like a skittish mare's. "Winterfell?" she says faintly. "Do you plan to live with us, sweet sister?"

"Of course," Arya says serenely, playing with her. "It is my home too."

"Yes, indeed," Margaery agrees, too quickly. "You will always be welcome there."

Arya smirks. "Yes, I'm sure. I wouldn't be a canker, foul and festering, would I, sweet Margaery? I wouldn't poison the happiness of your home, the innocence of your children, as you fear? You're as glad as I am that Sansa's dead, you'll never have to take her in your home, out of charity, now. You can say the prayers over her body and show the world that you've done your duty by her. If you weren't such a mealy-mouthed thing you'd wash your hands of me too - you'd like to see me dead because I'll never fit into your tidy world."

Margaery flushes faintly but does not deny it.

"Don't worry," Arya says flatly. "I won't go back. Ever. There's nothing for me there but happy memories and I'd lief as not poison those."

* * *

"You have been useful, a leal and faithful servant even though for only a short time. Without your help, we might never have cracked open the Rock so easily." The Queen smiles gently at the dwarf. She holds court today from Sunspear. They have brought the throne that sits at the palace out in the market square for her today, so that all might see her. Hundreds flock to see the Queen and her son - her lord is in the Westerlands where he has won a mighty victory. "For that you should be rewarded, Tyrion Lannister."

She sits under a silken awning in a russet gown, worn in the Westerosi style. She wears a delicate flowering crown of rose-gold, with her fair hair unbound and flowing down her shoulders. She waits for the Imp to make his obeisance before her and thank her. Then she continues. "But you have also committed the most heinous of all crimes. You have slain your own father. A kinslayer is accursed in the sight of gods and men."

"Your Grace, all I did I did for your service-"

"No. I think not." Daenerys shakes her head. All her movements are light, graceful but there is an oddly detached look in her face. "You did so for the sake of revenge and in hopes of advancement. You turned to me in desperation, your nephew had you condemned to death for high treason - I have made use of you, as I was advised to, but I can never trust you. Once a traitor, always a traitor. My son," she says, turning to Rhaego, seated on a throne next to her, "what do we do to traitors?"

The boy's eyes are dark, like two pits of stone in his small, copper face. Unreadable. "We burn them, lady mother," he says.

The Queen smiles and puts her hand gently on his head, as though blessing him. "Quite right, my son. Will you give the command?"

The boy's eyes never leave his prey. There is something almost akin to lust in his face, something that Arya has often seen in Joffrey's face. "Rhaegal. _Dracarys_."

Margaery grips Arya's hand as the flames burn the man into ash and charred bone. Arya is almost surprised to find herself gripping her sister-in-law's hand back. "They say she killed her khal," Margaery mouths to Arya. "Blood for bloodmagic."

Arya presses a finger to her lips. _I wouldn't be surprised,_ she thinks, _she calls him her sun-and-stars even now but I wouldn't be surprised at all if she did away with him._

* * *

Cersei and Jaime Lannister go out of the world as they came into it - together. He came clutching her heel and in the end he follows her, his hands wrapped around her throat. They say he strangled the life out from her in the White Tower, before driving the dagger through his own heart. She was all in white silk, like a maiden, but he named her a whore. It is all hearsay - tower and keep and city burned alike, consumed by wildfire, after the last battle was done. Thousands die in the flames, so the lovers can have the tragic beauty of a perfect ending.

"Minstrels will sing of them forever," Margaery observes dryly. "Cersei would have loved it."

When the new Queen hears, she shrugs and says she will have another capital, a city of marble and gold. She has never seen King's Landing, she is queen to a country that she has never known. She is more a tyrant, more an usurper than Robert Baratheon ever was.

They capture Joffrey in the last battle. He is in mortal agony, an arrow through one beautiful eye and screaming for the pain of the burns on his back. And Daenerys smiles at Arya, standing by her side and says, "This is your right, my lady. This is your privilege." She steps back decorously. She still looks as dainty as a doll, even in her boiled leathers and painted vest, her arms painted with Dothraki charms for luck in battle.

He is moaning in pain, eyes rolled up in the back of his head. Streaked with mud and blood he is not golden anymore but he still has his beauty. It seems too kind to put him out of his misery. Like putting a child to bed. There is no sense of closure. It does not seem fair that he should die so quickly, almost so easily (it is a cruel death, she knows, but somehow not cruel enough for him), while she has suffered for years. She knows she will resent the tenderness of his last hours for the rest of her life. She would like to flay him alive, rip out his bowels with a blunted knife, scoop out his eyeballs with a pin... she can almost taste the blood, it tastes like lust. But then when has life ever been fair?

They fill a shallow cup of his blood for her and she makes him watch as she drains it. That much at least she can do. She licks her lips and smiles at him with red teeth but his stare is half-glazed, his face blank as if he does not recognize her.

Arya has practiced this one word with Balerion - with the Queen looking on, of course. " _Dracarys_ ," she says quietly and Daenerys gives a delighted gurgle of laughter as she would at a clever child who had learned her lesson well.

Myrcella mounts the block the next day and with one clean stroke, the swordsman takes her head, with her beautiful golden hair, off. Arya sees to it that she has this one kindness.

* * *

Robb and Margaery will leave on the morrow. They have a fourth child now, a beautiful daughter - Daena, named for the Queen. A princess. The Lords of Winterfell now hold the right to call themselves the Kings of the North - subject of course to the High King and Queen of Westeros. It is as much of a compromise as Daenerys Targaryen will ever agree to - but then she loves Margaery. Some say she has a tender heart, that circumstances have always forced her hand so that she must appear harsher, sterner than she would be. Certainly Jorah Mormont thinks her as mild as dove. Arya thinks it is simply a stroke of luck in Margaery's favor, Daenerys' tender mercies are as indiscriminate as the rain - good in some years, terrible in others.

 _Someday her wrath will fall_ , she thinks. _Someday she will see traitors where she now sees beloved friends._ _Or if she does not, her son will._ It is said that every time a Targaryen is born the world holds its breath to see if it will be touched by greatness - or by madness. Both are equally likely. _Perhaps she will bear Aegon a child, a better one._ It is not likely though, it is whispered that the Queen is barren.

But Arya will not be here to see that day.

Daenerys kisses her on the cheek, as she would a sister, on her last day. She says that she is sorry that Arya will not be there to see the new capital - unnamed as of yet, though Arya expects she will try to insert "Queen" somewhere in the title - being built. She insists that she visit from time to time. Arya smiles and pretends to agree.

"I wish you would take more guards with you," Daenerys sighs. "One is scarcely enough."

"I do not need them, Your Grace," Arya tells her politely. "I mean to live as a private person. Where I am going no one will know me."

"Yes but..." Daenerys sighs. "But I'm sure Ser Gendry will take good care of you. He's quite dashing isn't he?" She winks at Arya. She is in quite a kittenish mood and there is no other mood that Arya so mistrusts her in. "He reminds me most strongly of Edric Storm, you know." That one has been made the Lord of Storm's End. It is said that he has fallen in love with his cousin, Shireen, the Lady of Dragonstone.

Arya shrugs. Black hair and blue eyes are not uncommon - surely not ever man or woman with those looks could be one of Robert Baratheon's bastards. The young knight appointed to her was a bastard who grew up in Fleabottom.

The next day they take ship. Arya wears a tunic and breeches, her hair cut as short as it was when she was a child and bundled under a cap. Slim as she is, with her face half-hidden, you might take her for a young lad, a squire of good birth. You would take the knight accompanying her to be the master. Arya stands on the deck, watching the makeshift city grow smaller and smaller in the distance. Someday she might even come back. Life is too long to predict. And yet, too short to waste. She is twenty years old today.

"Do you like to travel, Ser Gendry?" she asks him. "You offered yourself up for this post. Do you have no mother or sweetheart who will miss you?"

He is a gruff young man, his gruffness only a mask for shyness she senses. Pure as a boy - stupid, she thinks, with a glance at him, stubborn. Good. She prefers stupid.

He bows and says that he has not. She shrugs and leaves him to himself. She has never been a one to waste words either. After a while though he says, with something of an effort, "I've never made anything of myself here, Your Grace. me just a Fleabottom bastard. I was hoping I'd do better in a different place. And I've no one here who'd miss me either."

"To Braavos then," she says aloud. He bows to her as though she has made a toast and suddenly she cannot help laughing. "We will dance on the Moon Pool, you and I," she tells him, feigning a lightness of spirit. _And someday I will be as light as I feign to be,_ she promises to herself. She will hold herself to that promise as well. Someday she will be happy. She owes that much to herself. "And if you cannot, I will teach you."

**Author's Note:**

> **Originally this was supposed to be straightforward just to explore Arya/Joffrey (crack-pairing at it's best). I was interested in the five year delay that GRRM had originally planned and what would have become of the Targaryen plan if the dragons hadn't hatched and if Varys and Illyrio had been able to delay their plan by some years as they wanted to. And Sansa/Theon and Robb/Margaery are also pairings I've looked forward to. Next chapter is from Arya's point of view. On fanfiction.net I am Sera dy Relandrant. I post here just to see if I can put wacky tags on the relationship panel. It's fun.**


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